Shane van Gisbergen Continues to Improve on Ovals

Road and street courses: Of course. Superspeedways? Check.

So Shane van Gisbergen has figured out how to run well at superspeedways in addition to his frequent dominance on road and street courses. So what? He can never win a championship on those disciplines alone.

Good early-season runs at Martinsville Speedway and Phoenix Raceway made the case that SVG can run well enough on the short tracks, too. He may not be at a point to win there yet, but well enough to hold serve in the points as long as he can avoid trouble on superspeedways and keep dominating at the road courses.

That leaves the intermediate tracks. Surely van Gisbergen couldn’t be a serious threat for a title, because he was way behind on those tracks that appear so often on the schedule.

Or is he?

Take a look through his results on the intermediates and you will see steady improvement. He finished third in the second race of the season at Atlanta Motor Speedway, but despite its intermediate distance, it’s really more like a superspeedway with how it’s driven.

The 35-year-old from Auckland, New Zealand never had a chance to run well at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where an engine failure ended his day after just 27 laps completed. Texas Motor Speedway was next up, and he finished a mediocre 18th there. Given his lack of experience at such a track, it was better than mediocre, but he will be judged like the rest of the field.

He rattled off back-to back-to-back finishes of 15th at Darlington Raceway’s famed egg-shaped oval, Charlotte Motor Speedway and Nashville Superspeedway. His fourth-place result at Indianapolis Motor Speedway certainly raised some eyebrows, but it was such an anomaly at the time that it could be considered a fluke.

In his second shot at the track “Too Tough to Tame” (Darlington), he finished 7th — eight places higher than his debut there. This past weekend (Sept. 28) at Kansas Speedway, the Kiwi took another step forward with an impressive eighth in the final running order. In doing so, van Gisbergen beat several playoff drivers including Jesse Love (ninth), Riley Herbst (10th), Parker Kligerman (12th), Sam Mayer (13th), AJ Allmendinger (17th), Sammy Smith (22nd) and regular-season darling Justin Allgaier, who had a dreadful day and eventually succumbed to damage from numerous incidents, finishing 36th.

Take a moment to think about those results. Kansas is…