Most drivers would take the compliment. Shane van Gisbergen took offense.
As NASCAR prepared for the first Cup Series race on the streets around Naval Base Coronado, the bookmakers did what they always do when a road course appears on the schedule. They installed the New Zealander as a heavy favorite, his odds sitting at around minus 160, and waited for everyone to nod along. Van Gisbergen refused to play his part.
“It pisses me off a bit. I feel like it disrespects my competition,” he said.
It was a striking thing to say from a man whose record on anything other than an oval has become almost absurd. But it revealed something about how van Gisbergen sees himself, and about the strange position he now occupies in a sport that did not quite know what to do with him when he arrived.
The Numbers Behind the Hype
The favorite tag is not a hunch. In his 14 non-oval starts in the Cup Series since his debut in 2023, van Gisbergen has won half of them. Seven victories from fourteen attempts is the kind of strike rate that does not exist anywhere else on the grid, and it includes a remarkable run in 2025 when he won five road and street races in a single season, taking Mexico City, Chicago, Sonoma, Watkins Glen and Charlotte.
This year has followed the pattern. He ran second to Tyler Reddick on the Austin road course earlier in the season, then answered with a commanding win at Watkins Glen in May, the seventh Cup triumph of his career. San Diego, the only true street circuit on the 2026 calendar after the downtown Chicago race fell off the schedule, looks tailor-made for him.
So the odds make sense. What van Gisbergen objects to is the suggestion that any of this is simple.
“I think they’re at a really high level,” he said of his rivals. “I feel like I’ve spent the last little while talking myself down because I know that there are 10 guys probably that can win on pure pace. In NASCAR, so much stuff can happen with strategies and stages that there are even more guys who can win. I don’t think it’s going to be easy, that’s for sure.”
Where the Talent Comes From
The thing that separates van Gisbergen is not a secret, and his rivals are happy to explain it. Before NASCAR, he was a three-time champion in Australia’s Supercars series, a category built on heavy, powerful, hard-to-drive cars racing on street circuits and undulating road courses. The transition to a Cup car on a temporary track is, for him, less a leap than a homecoming.
Brad Keselowski put it plainly when asked who might challenge on the bumpy Coronado layout. “You mean besides Shane?” he laughed, before getting serious. “I think Shane’s background is the ideal background, which is V8 Supercars. This is kind of what they do, similar cars, similar types of tracks. That’s really what you look for is those experiences that give them the best opportunity to be successful.”
Keselowski went on to rank the pathways that prepare a driver for this kind of racing, placing Supercars first and Trans Am experience second, with time in the Cup Series itself a distant third. It was, in effect, a veteran admitting that no amount of stock car laps can replicate what van Gisbergen learned on the streets of Australia and New Zealand.
A Track That Reminds Him of Home
If anyone needed proof of how deep that experience runs, van Gisbergen offered a tour of the new circuit drawn entirely from memory of tracks half a world away. He compared the second corner to a turn at Sydney’s old Homebush street circuit, with the same bumps and surface changes. He reached for Sebring when describing the rougher asphalt, and not as a compliment.
“Homebush, Hamilton, and then maybe Sebring,” he said, listing the layouts the Coronado course brought to mind. “Yeah, Sebring is top five worst tracks I’ve ever done. It reminds me of that. This is not bad. There are bits that remind me of all different types of tracks I’ve done.”
One feature stood out as new even to him. “The rail roads are quite new, especially how you cross them sideways,” he said of the level crossings cut into the base. After walking the circuit, he expected those rails to be among the trickiest points on the lap.
The Reality of Practice
For all the talk of dominance, the single practice session at San Diego delivered a reminder that street racing punishes everyone eventually. Van Gisbergen was only eighth fastest, 0.732 seconds adrift of Kyle Larson, who topped the chart for Hendrick Motorsports. He admitted his Trackhouse Racing crew made a mistake in the closing minutes that cost him a second run on fresh tires.
“It’s so hard to hear around here, I was screaming to come in and I couldn’t hear anything so I missed a run, we missed that last set,” he said. “That’s okay.”
He was also struck by how quickly the tires gave up, comparing the surface to the abrasive Charlotte ROVAL. “It was surprising how much fall-off there was,” he said. “I feel like I was slow but I guess everyone else was too. It feels like the ROVAL where they only last two or three laps.” On a track where the field cannot hear its own crews and the rubber disappears in a handful of laps, even the man who wins these races for a living is bracing for chaos.
The Burden of Being the Standard
There is a quiet generosity in van Gisbergen’s discomfort with the favorite label. He has spent two and a half years being treated as an outsider who happens to be unbeatable on a specific kind of track, a novelty act with a devastating party trick. By insisting that ten drivers can win, he is asking to be seen as part of the field rather than a separate category within it.
The irony is that his protest only underlines how good he is. A driver does not get to complain about being the favorite unless he has earned the title many times over. As the grid lines up for NASCAR’s first visit to San Diego, the question is not really whether van Gisbergen is capable of winning. It is whether anyone can stop him on the kind of circuit where, for his entire career, almost no one has.
He would tell you that plenty of them can. The record suggests otherwise, and that gap between what he says and what he does is exactly what makes him the most fascinating driver in the Cup Series right now.
A Two Year Education in Stock Cars
What gets lost in the road-course headlines is how far van Gisbergen has come everywhere else. When he first arrived full time, the ovals that make up the bulk of the Cup schedule were a foreign language to a driver raised on right-hand turns and street circuits. He spent his rookie campaign learning the rhythms of pack racing, the patience of a 400-mile day, and the brutal margins of stock car competition, often well outside the spotlight that follows his road-course weekends.
That progress is part of why his protest about the favorite tag rings true. He is no longer a one-trick specialist parachuting in for the occasional road course. He is a full-time Cup driver who happens to be untouchable on a specific kind of track, and who is quietly trying to become competitive everywhere else. San Diego, with its bumps and blind crossings and disappearing tires, is the type of weekend where his ceiling is higher than anyone’s. It is also, by his own insistence, a weekend where a dozen rivals are capable of beating him if he puts a wheel wrong.
Sources:
- https://speedcafe.com/nascar-news-2026-cup-series-san-diego-practice-results-shane-van-gisbergen-preview-favourite-odds-comments-reaction-brad-keselowski/
- https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nascar/2026-nascar-odds-naval-base-coronado-san-diego-anduril-250
- https://www.nascar.com/drivers/shane-van-gisbergen
