Shane van Gisbergen says it felt like he was finishing \u201c50th\u201d in every NASCAR Cup Series race earlier this year, before an impressive mid-season turnaround saw him score three wins in the span of five races.<\/p>\n
The three-time Supercars champion endured a tough start to his first full Cup campaign, struggling to adapt to the unique challenges of oval racing. In the first 15 races, he broke into the top 10 just once, with an average finishing position of 25.26.<\/p>\n
However, the Kiwi finally got his season on track with a breakthrough victory in NASCAR\u2019s inaugural race in Mexico City last month. He then followed it up with back-to-back triumphs in Chicago and Sonoma to strengthen his bid for the playoffs.<\/p>\n
While van Gisbergen acknowledges there is still room for improvement on ovals, with all three of his wins this season coming on road courses or street circuits, he believes he and the Trackhouse team have made meaningful strides over the last two months.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, it\u2019s weird. We were coming 50th it felt like,\u201d he said of his early-season form.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it wasn\u2019t complete end of the world. I felt like I was getting better as a driver, getting closer to my teammates and starting to match what they were doing. You could just feel that we were better than what we were. It just had to sort of click.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe last month and a half, two months, we\u2019ve really started getting better \u2014 the 88 car, and then also the team as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s four wins for us now as a team [including Ross Chastain\u2019s Coca-Cola 600 victory], and it\u2019s been an amazing turnaround for everyone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not under any illusion we\u2019re going to go out next week and win, but I\u2019d like to keep that progression going and keep building toward the midfield and then the top half of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Sonoma, van Gisbergen had to survive three late restarts and withstood sustained pressure from Chase Briscoe\u2019s No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, ultimately holding on to win by 1.1s.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was tough. There were certainly marbles. This soft tyre leaves so many marbles around the track, and you\u2019re trying to be respectful when you line up two-wide, but you end up pushing each other into the marbles, even though you\u2019re not trying to,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen we both take off and you could hear the marbles flicking up on the guards and stuff. It was really slippery.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you just know all those people up at the front \u2014 it was the 19, 24, 20 we were mainly racing \u2014 and they\u2019re great guys to race. I always race well with them and enjoy it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew Chase wasn\u2019t going to do anything stupid, but he got really close at Turn 2 a couple of times, and he had a proper crack. It was cool racing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shane van Gisbergen says it felt like he was finishing \u201c50th\u201d in every NASCAR Cup Series race earlier…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[425,99],"class_list":["post-8722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}