Shane van Gisbergen heads into the Daytona 500 this year looking to make better memories than the 33rd-place finish he recorded in his maiden race at the iconic track in 2025. It will be difficult, of course. On road courses, he cleaned the table, winning five of six last season. On ovals, however, while SVG took his lumps early, he eventually began to find his footing.
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Through Michigan in June, his first stretch of oval races produced finishes hovering between 26.6 and 30.4 on average. From midseason onward, those numbers dropped into the 22.2 to 23.2 range, shifting his overall oval average from 26.26 in the first half of the season to 22.73 in the second. On drafting tracks, he now holds a 24.6 average finish across 10 starts. It is not lighting up the scoring tower, but it is no longer riding shotgun either.
Daytona is its own circus, and the Trackhouse Racing driver, who has qualified in 37th for the race on Sunday, knows it all too well. He has been working in the garage like a handshake tour, trying not to step on toes. In the pre-race scrum, he admitted as much.
“I’m still learning and trying to make friends, I guess,” he said. “Like, it’s still people leave you for no reason or you do something wrong and lose the trust of people. So, yeah, it takes a while how to understand to put your car in the right place, yeah.”
Van Gisbergen understands that the learning curve on ovals is still big. Though, he has definitely made progress on the same, he shared his unfiltered take on how different it is from what he has done in the past, saying, “I don’t know where to start. Yeah, like it’s the driving, the setups, the cars, the racing dynamic, how the surface changes.
“Yeah, there’s so many different things. It’s a completely different discipline to any other driving,” the New Zealand driver added.
“It was always early mornings, I guess, or mid-mornings, but yeah, like I’d watch the race, but wouldn’t watch a whole one, you know, just the end.”
–@shanevg97 talks about watching the Daytona 500 before coming to NASCAR and his plans to get better finishes on ovals.… pic.twitter.com/lm0COYO7nC
— Frontstretch (@Frontstretch) February 11, 2026
SVG is not pretending he can jump the queue in a single season. The deer-in-the-headlights phase has faded, though, and he now feels more in step with the rhythm of a race weekend, more at ease in the pack.
Late last year, the box score did not tell the full story. In Van Gisbergen’s final five oval starts, he ran inside the top 15 in three of them before chaos intervened. At New Hampshire, he drove into the top five on pace, only to get turned on a restart. At Kansas the following week, he notched his first oval top-10 finish. Two weeks later, he was again running inside the top 10 on speed before another restart stacked the deck against him.
At Talladega in the fall, Van Gisbergen came from the back, led the outside lane, dragged it forward more than once, and had a top-10 finish in hand until the tri-oval turned into a yard sale on the final lap, leaving him P11. More than once, he drove toward the front only to get caught in someone else’s mess. Other times, the balance went away and the car pushed through the corners. By any count, several top-10 or top-15 runs slipped through his fingers.
SVG’s take on the strategy change with the new chase format
Van Gisbergen was brought into NASCAR with a win-and-you’re-in mindset under the elimination format. With the Chase format back and fewer road courses on the calendar, the math changes. One trophy no longer punches a ticket in the same way, so the team’s overall approach has to follow suit. That is exactly what he aims to do. He intends to be more consistent on ovals, finish better, and stack points week to week.
“Yeah, like I said earlier, that’s our goal is to just accumulate points now,” he said of the reset with the No. 97 team. “You have to try and achieve as many points as you can every weekend, and it probably changes the way you take risks if you’re probably going to be like us, a guy trying to point our way in. So, yeah, I probably will approach it a bit different, I think.”
The 2026 schedule stacks 32 oval races, three road courses, one street course, and four non-championship oval events. All road and street races sit in the regular season, which keeps a door open for him.
But if Van Gisbergen wants to be in the mix when it counts, he has to make hay on left turns. That’s because, in the playoffs, it is all ovals. And if he wants a seat at the table, he has to earn it the hard way, one circle at a time.
