The trucks and haulers rolled out of San Diego, pointed north, and didn't stop until they hit wine country.
Sonoma Raceway. Sunday afternoon. And if you thought NASCAR's street-course experiment last weekend was wild, wait until you see what the road-course specialists do when you hand them a real one.
The Toyota / Save Mart 350 goes green Sunday, June 28, at 3:30 p.m. ET on TNT. It's race 18 of 36, which puts us in the back half of the regular season with nine races left until the playoff cutoff. The math is starting to matter, folks.
Sonoma is a 1.99-mile, 12-turn road course, 110 laps of up-and-down, left-and-right, brake-and-pray. It is the kind of place that does not care one bit who's leading the points. It cares about who can drive.
And nobody drives a road course right now like Shane van Gisbergen, the No. 97 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet. The Kiwi won at Sonoma last year from the pole, and his record at the place is a perfect one-for-one: one start, one win, an average finish of 1.0. Let me tell you something: that is not normal. But here's the twist that makes Sunday must-watch. Van Gisbergen sits 17th in points, five behind the playoff cutoff. He is on the wrong side of the bubble, and a win locks him in. So he shows up to one of the best road courses on the schedule needing exactly the thing he does best. Buckle up.
He's got company. Kyle Larson, the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, leads all active drivers with two Sonoma wins (2021 and 2024) and four poles. Chase Elliott, the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, is the quiet assassin here: a Sonoma average finish of 10.2 and a driver rating north of 100, both second-best in the field. And don't sleep on the trend. The last four Sonoma winners are four different drivers: Daniel Suárez in 2022, Martin Truex Jr. in 2023, Larson in 2024, van Gisbergen in 2025. Road courses spread the wealth.
Up front in the championship, Tyler Reddick, the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota, still leads, but his cushion got thin in San Diego. He's at 716 points, just eight clear of Denny Hamlin, the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. Then it's a drop to Ryan Blaney, Larson and Ty Gibbs. Everybody else is racing the cutoff line, and a road course is exactly where a wild-card winner can come from and blow the bubble wide open.
Which brings us to the story hanging over the weekend. A week ago in San Diego, a Truck Series regular named Corey Heim crashed the Cup party and won the thing in a one-off ride. Van Gisbergen, meanwhile, dominated the early laps at San Diego and then got swept up in a wreck and finished 38th. The road-course favorites come to Sonoma with something to prove and some bad luck to bury.
One more reason to tune in early: AJ Allmendinger, the No. 16 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet, makes his 500th career Cup Series start Sunday in his home state of California. The man can drive a road course in his sleep, and he'll be calling Saturday's O'Reilly Series race from the booth before he straps in.
Nine races to the playoff cutoff. A bubble that runs straight through a road-course ace who needs a win to climb out of it. A track that's crowned four different drivers in four straight years. Sonoma has a way of separating the racers from the riders, and Sunday afternoon it goes to work again.