Shane van Gisbergen has spent 2025 sharpening his oval craft, not only in NASCAR but by cutting his teeth in Legend cars to fast-track the learning curve. The extra seat time has begun to pay dividends. Driving for Joe Ryan Racecars, he competed in the Cook Out Summer Shootout Series at Charlotte Motor Speedway and scored his first pavement oval win in July.
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That progress has carried into the Cup competition. He qualified 11th at Indianapolis, grabbed the pole at North Wilkesboro, and rolled off 10th at New Hampshire. In Kansas, despite starting deep in the pack, he broke through with his first career top-10 finish on an oval.
The day hardly started smoothly for the Trackhouse Racing driver. SVG was forced to serve a stop-and-go penalty on pit road for inspection infractions and lost his crew chief, Stephen Doran, to suspension, burying the No. 88 Red Bull team in an early hole.
The penalty left him a lap down, and he stayed there through the first stage. A crash on lap 90 gave him the free pass, and he restarted 35th. By the close of stage two, he had clawed to 19th.
From there, SVG picked his way forward. He reached the top 15, then broke into the top 10 as the laps wound down. Contact with William Byron shoved him into Alex Bowman, raising questions about damage to the car, but SVG brushed it off and kept marching.
He ran eighth when the penultimate caution flew with under 10 laps to go and restarted ninth. When the dust settled, he crossed the line 10th, fending off teammate Ross Chastain for his best oval finish in a Cup Series points race.
After climbing from the car, SVG was candid about the grind. “I think it’s a process. This shit’s pretty difficult, and I just uh it’s taken me time to get better and better, and yeah, the guys are doing a great job with the car, and um yeah, it was it was a tough one. We put ourselves two laps down with a penalty and had to come back, and yeah, it was a pretty awesome day,” he said.
He added that confidence has started to follow experience. “Well, we had speed. I still had a lot to learn, and I was trying to place my car in the right spots, and yeah, once we got on equal tires and equal lap to people, I was able to pick people off and move around, and I never had so much confidence to move around. So, it’s just a process of learning and yeah, I’m getting better.”
Shane van Gisbergen on first oval Top 10:
“It’s just a process of learning; I’m getting better”
Presenting partner: @MyPlaceHotels pic.twitter.com/yi7l1cbWOl
— Frontstretch (@Frontstretch) September 28, 2025
Reflecting on two years of full-time Cup racing, SVG admitted the steep climb is all about time in the seat. Learning vehicle dynamics, banking, speed, and aero from scratch has made tracks like Kansas especially demanding. Still, he emphasized he’s enjoying the challenge.
Recent results show the No. 88 team finding its stride. A 14th-place finish at Richmond hinted at improvement, and a top-five run at New Hampshire reinforced it before bad luck struck.
Though his playoff run ended in the Round of 16, SVG has made his mission clear: use the rest of 2025 to turn his oval learning curve into a weapon. If the trajectory holds, the sport may be staring down a far more dangerous SVG in 2026.
