Shane van Gisbergen climbed out of his No. 97 Chevrolet at Daytona International Speedway in 28th place, his fuel tank empty and his season’s biggest goal gone with it. He did not throw his helmet. He did not raise his voice. Asked how he felt after missing NASCAR’s first ever Chase field by 17 points, he answered like a man reading out a weather report.
“I don’t get emotional about that stuff,” van Gisbergen said. “Just trust what they say and pit because they told me to. It is what it is.”
That flat delivery says almost everything about how the biggest name in New Zealand motorsport spent his third full Cup Series season learning ovals he never grew up racing, and how he has learned to carry a disappointment that would flatten most drivers three years into a new discipline.
A Fuel Number That Cost Him Everything
Van Gisbergen entered the Coke Zero Sugar 400 holding a 31-point cushion over Ryan Preece for the 16th and final transfer spot. He earned his first career stage win on an oval that night and picked up 10 points in the opening stanza while Preece slid through the grass behind him. For a moment, the math favored the Kiwi comfortably.
Then a caution flew on Lap 155 for a three-car pileup, and crew chief Stephen Doran made the call that would decide the whole year. He brought van Gisbergen down pit road to guarantee he had enough gas to finish, sacrificing track position to protect against a worse outcome: running out of fuel altogether.
“We tried to stay on Preece’s strategy, and we would have been fine if it ran green,” Doran told NASCAR.com. “Getting that caution with a long cleanup put us in a bad spot where we just don’t get as good of mileage as the Fords do. We were going to be in a spot where, more than likely, we were going to run out than make it, so we chose to pit and be on offense and try to drive back up through there, and got taken out on the last lap.”
Van Gisbergen restarted 27th. Six laps into overtime, Preece drove past Zane Smith for the win as a multi-car incident collected cars down the backstretch, van Gisbergen among them. Preece finished with 67 points to van Gisbergen’s 19, a swing that turned a 31-point lead into a 17-point deficit in one night.
The Respect of the Man Who Beat Him
Preece, who spent the second half of the season fighting off a Trackhouse driver who had never raced most of these ovals before 2023, did not celebrate at van Gisbergen’s expense. He talked about him like a rival worth the title fight.
“He’s a hell of a race car driver,” Preece said in his winner’s press conference. “He’s a hell of a road course racer, but he’s a hell of a race car driver. He knew that I had my knee on the throat or my thumb on the pressure point, and he answered that in Stage 1. When he threw that right hook, metaphorically, in a metaphor, I felt like I answered that back in Stage 2. I’m proud of the racer I am. I’m proud of competing against him. The bar he sets on road courses, because he’s a true talent that we’re lucky to have here in the United States.”
It is a strange kind of tribute, a winner crediting the man he eliminated with raising his own game. But it captures how far van Gisbergen has traveled in NASCAR’s estimation. He arrived through Trackhouse’s PROJECT91 program in 2023 and won his very first Cup Series start on the streets of Chicago, a feat no debutant had managed in 60 years.
Eight Finishes That Actually Cost Him the Chase
Van Gisbergen refused to let Daytona alone carry the blame, and the record backs him. He posted eight finishes of 30th or worse across the 26-race regular season, results that bled points long before the fuel call at Daytona ever came into play.
“I don’t put down Preece winning tonight, it’s not a one-night loss,” van Gisbergen said. “I haven’t done a good enough job throughout the year; we’ve lost points at various places. We didn’t just lose it tonight. It is what it is.”
He closed the regular season with two victories and five top-five finishes, including fifth-place runs on ovals at Nashville Superspeedway and North Wilkesboro Speedway, tracks that would have terrified him on paper three years ago. His seven top-10 finishes matched his rookie total, evidence of genuine progress even inside a season that ended one spot short of the postseason.
“I’m proud that I’m closer to my teammates on ovals and managed to have a pretty good year,” van Gisbergen said. “Obviously, I want to do better as a team. As a team, we’re not quite there, but I think we’ve made good improvement on the ovals compared to my teammates.”
All Three Trackhouse Cars Left Out
Van Gisbergen’s exit stung more with his entire team going down alongside him. Ross Chastain and Connor Zilisch, his Trackhouse Racing teammates, also missed the Chase, meaning the organization that fielded the sport’s most talked about international signing failed to send a single driver into the new 10-race postseason format.
Doran, for his part, still called the season a step forward rather than a setback. “I still say it’s been a solid year,” he said. “This was one of the main goals, was to get into the Chase. We just need to keep getting our cars better. We’ve got 10 races to keep pushing these cars to be better. I think we’ve made some ground over the last couple of months. We just have to keep gaining, especially on intermediates, is the biggest deficit right now to the field.”
Van Gisbergen’s transition into NASCAR has always carried a subplot beyond wins and points. He left a stacked Supercars resume behind, 80 race wins, 47 poles, three Bathurst 1000 victories, and back-to-back Australian titles, to start over on an ocean of unfamiliar mile-and-a-half ovals against drivers who had raced them from childhood. The Daytona result did not erase that project. It just delayed the next proof point.
A Season Without a Trophy That Still Counts
NASCAR switched to a Chase format for the first time in over a decade this year, closing out a knockout-style playoff structure the sport had run from 2014 through 2025. Van Gisbergen becomes a footnote in that history for the wrong reason, the driver who arrived with a 31-point cushion and left with none. But footnotes are not verdicts.
He is 36 years old, three seasons into a career switch most drivers his age never attempt, and still building the fuel-strategy instincts and short-track feel that come naturally to lifers raised in the sport. Ten Chase races will run without him this fall. He will spend them watching Preece, the driver who beat him by 17 points, try to do something van Gisbergen still has not: win a NASCAR Cup Series championship. Whether he gets there before van Gisbergen does could say less about talent than about how quickly a 36-year-old road racer from Auckland can finish becoming an oval racer from anywhere.
Road Courses Still Belong to Him
Van Gisbergen’s regular-season victories both came on road courses, the terrain that made him a star before he ever set foot in a Cup Series garage, and three of NASCAR’s remaining races this year run on that same kind of layout. None of them count toward a title he can no longer win, but each one is a chance to remind the field why Trackhouse pursued him in the first place and why rival crew chiefs still treat his qualifying laps as a warning sign.
Chastain, who has raced alongside van Gisbergen at Trackhouse from the start, has watched the transformation up close. The team built its international pipeline around the idea that road-course speed would eventually translate to oval results, and van Gisbergen’s five wins and 12 top-five finishes across his two full Cup seasons suggest the theory is working, just not yet on the calendar’s biggest stage. The next 10 weekends will not decide a champion for him, but they will decide how the rest of the garage remembers this season: as a near miss on the way somewhere, or a ceiling he has already found.
