Shane van Gisbergen has won seven NASCAR Cup Series races. Every single one came on a road course. If he wins the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma on Sunday, he becomes the first driver in the sport's history whose first eight Cup victories are all road courses, a record that says as much about NASCAR as it does about him.
Here is the thing about van Gisbergen: he is elite at the part of the sport NASCAR does least. Put him on an oval, where most of the schedule lives, and he is one more car in the field. Put him on a road course and he becomes someone else. Since the start of 2025 he has run inside the top five for 79 percent of his laps on road courses and inside the top 10 for 90 percent. He won here last year from the pole, the first pole-winner to win at Sonoma in over two decades. The New Zealander did not come to NASCAR to be good at ovals. He came to win the road courses, and he is doing exactly that.
Sunday's race is also the opener of NASCAR's In-Season Challenge, the five-week, 32-driver bracket that turns ordinary summer Sundays into win-or-go-home survival. Half the storylines on pit road have nothing to do with the trophy and everything to do with beating one specific opponent. Daniel Suárez, who got his first career Cup win right here at Sonoma in 2022, opens against Todd Gilliland.
And the points leader has the most to lose. That is Tyler Reddick, eight points up on Denny Hamlin, and Sonoma is one of the few tracks that genuinely scares him: his average finish here sits north of 20th, among his worst anywhere. The cruel part is that he led the most laps in the 2024 Sonoma race and still lost it, and the driver who leads the most laps has won six of the last seven here. Reddick is the No. 1 seed and the season-long championship favorite. Neither helps much at a track he has never solved. The only active drivers who have ever won at Sonoma, in fact, are Larson, Suárez, and van Gisbergen.
There is a fair knock on all of this. Winning road courses when you are a road-course specialist is nearly circular, and van Gisbergen will spend the other thirty weekends of the year as an afterthought. But no driver in the history of the sport has done even this, and the record book does not care how you got the wins. Seven for seven. Sunday the eighth is right in front of him, at the track where he is most himself, in his 68th Cup start.
Green flag is 3:30 p.m. ET Sunday on TNT. Most of the field is racing for points. Thirty-two of them are also racing to survive a bracket. One is racing for a record that, until him, nobody thought to keep.