CHICAGO — There’s a line about the pinball wizard in the Who’s rock opera “Tommy” that goes “What makes him so good?”
After Sunday’s Grant Park 165 on the Chicago Street Course, race fans, pundits and competitors alike were asking the same thing about Shane van Gisbergen.
The statistics speak for themselves. On road courses in the NASCAR Cup Series, Van Gisbergen has posted a win, two top fives and five top 10s. Most recently, he won the Mexico City race by an amazing 16.567 seconds over runner-up Christopher Bell.
On the Chicago Street Course (not included in road course stats), he has two victories in three attempts.
His numbers in the NASCAR Xfinity Series are even more daunting. In five road course starts, he boasts two victories and four top fives.
SVG has won the two Xfinity races he has run on the Chicago Street Course, both from the pole. On Sunday, he completed a weekend sweep of the Xfinity and Cup races, having won the pole for each event.
Kyle Busch, who finished fifth in Chicago, is the only other driver to have swept an Xfinity/Cup weekend after winning the pole for both races, a feat he accomplished at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in July 2016.
Trackhouse Racing owner Justin Marks, who fielded the No. 88 Chevrolet Van Gisbergen drove to victory on Sunday, had his own ideas about the New Zealander’s superiority.
“For me, in my experience driving race cars for 20 years, it’s his racing IQ,” said Marks, an accomplished road racer himself. “It’s how strategic he can think while he’s on the limit of the race car.
“A lot of drivers, it takes all of your mental bandwidth to drive the car fast, and Shane is one of these guys that can drive the car at the limit but be thinking bigger picture stuff. He knows where he is in the race, and he knows how to… he’s great at managing his tires, his equipment, all that kind of stuff.”
Clearly, SVG’s talents are ideally suited to the streets of Chicago.
“I think for his talent profile specifically, street races are just… they come very, very naturally to him,” Marks said.
“He’s got a lot of experience doing it in the V8 Supercars series, but I think in races like this, where everybody is working so hard just to get the apexes and get out of the corner in the right way and all of that, he does that just naturally while he’s thinking about bigger picture stuff, so he can really put the whole race together in a super impressive way.”
Stephen Doran is the crew chief who sets up the Cup cars to Van Gisbergen’s liking.
“You watch him, and he’s like a machine out there,” Doran said. “He makes no mistakes, and he just waits until somebody misses an apex in front of him and he pounces on them.
“He just drives through the field. You saw it (Saturday) and (Sunday). His laps are so consistent, and that’s part of why he saves his tires so well.”
There’s more to it than that. SVG is a three-time champion in Australian Supercars, a gritty series where no quarter is given. That same series also honed the skills of Marcos Ambrose, who enjoyed significant success on road courses after coming to NASCAR racing in 2006.
Fellow competitors saw how Van Gisbergen was willing to run JR Motorsports teammate Connor Zilisch wide in Turn 1 after the decisive restart in Saturday’s Xfinity Series race.
Cup Series driver Tyler Reddick took note.
“Obviously, I saw what Shane was willing to do to win the race on Saturday, and for us needing a win to lock ourselves into the playoffs, I would have raced really hard, because I think he would have done the same,” said Reddick, who finished third after chasing Van Gisbergen and runner-up Ty Gibbs over the closing laps on Sunday.
“But it didn’t happen, but we can all dream and speculate what it could have been.”
Remarkably, SVG has adapted almost instantly to the road course versions of both the Gen 7 Cup car and the Xfinity car—two vastly different platforms.
To rise to Van Gisbergen’s level of excellence on road and street courses, competitors in both series not only have to sharpen their road racing skills but also must adopt a take-no-prisoners mentality to match his level of determination.
Otherwise, “What makes him so good?” will continue to be an often-asked question.
