Another rugby ball with Shane van Gisbergen’s signature on it flew into the grandstands on Saturday after the New Zealander ended up winning his second Xfinity Series race at Sonoma. The victory comes on the back of his maiden Xfinity Series win last weekend in Portland. He is now only the eighth driver in series history to win their first two races back-to-back.
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Others who’ve done it before him include Chase Elliott, William Byron, and Austin Cindric. van Gisbergen sped his way to the lead at Sonoma on a late restart with eleven laps remaining. He finished 1.323 seconds ahead of runner-up Sheldon Creed after a tough battle with Austin Hill. Notably, he had a similar battle with Hill in the race at COTA – which resulted in them both losing the win to Kyle Larson.
He said in the aftermath of the win, “Man, what a race – an adventure up and down and up and down all day. But that last restart I was just giving it all I had and two guys going for the same real estate came together. It was pretty awesome though, a lot of fun. Hope everyone enjoyed the show. Pretty awesome back-to-back weeks for us.” Needless to say, Hill wasn’t as pleased.
With two straight wins, @ShaneVG97 is the eighth driver in Xfinity history to win their first two races back-to-back.
SVG joins Rick Mast, Steve Grissom, Chad Little, Jamie McMurray, Chase Elliott, William Byron, and Austin Cindric on that list.#NASCAR | @XfinityRacing pic.twitter.com/p1PmoA9nkQ
— Joseph Srigley (@joe_srigley) June 9, 2024
The Richard Childress Racing driver finished in fifth place after leading 21 laps and admitted that any comment he made would end up being wrong. He said taking the high road, “We’ll just go on to the next one, good hard racing. We were holding off SVG for a while, had that caution and I knew it was going to be tough on the restart and it didn’t work out. But we had a good points day and finished in the top-five. You can’t ask for more than that.”
The back-to-back wins of Chase Elliott and William Byron in the Xfinity Series
When Elliott did the feat that van Gisbergen has managed now, the year was 2014 and he was an 18-year-old youngster. Driving a JR Motorsports car, his first win came at Texas in the sixth race of the season. He immediately followed it up with an even taller victory at Darlington. He went to collect another win weeks later at Chicago en route to his first NASCAR championship.
Byron would follow through on his path behind, again, a JR Motorsports car in 2017. His first win came at Iowa and his second came the next weekend at Daytona. He went on to win two more races that year before being crowned the Xfinity Series champion. Could van Gisbergen be the next in line to win back-to-back races to start the tally and become the champion?
