- Shane van Gisbergen says Austin Hill is the kind of racer who needs “the last laugh,” and accuses him of threatening exactly that in a tense NASCAR hauler meeting.
- The pair’s feud stretches back to a July incident at Chicagoland and has resurfaced race after race, most recently with Hill telling his own spotter to stop lecturing him mid-race at Kansas.
- NASCAR has now pulled both drivers in twice to manage the tension, and van Gisbergen admits he has more to lose than Hill does if it boils over again.
A Kiwi Who Doesn’t Fight and a Nascar Journeyman Who Won’t Let Go
Shane van Gisbergen sat in a NASCAR hauler for the first time in his career this September, across from Austin Hill, and walked out more unsettled than when he walked in. “That was my first time in the hauler,” van Gisbergen said afterward. “One person seemed more remorseful and eager to move on than the other.” He did not need to name who. Everyone in the garage already knew.
Van Gisbergen, the three-time Supercars champion who turned a Chicago street race debut into a full-time Cup career, built his reputation on clean, hard racing. He said as much himself: “I think it’s a respect thing. I feel like everyone here I’ve been able to race with respect.” Then he described Hill in blunter terms than most drivers risk on the record. “He’s the kind of personality who feels like he’s got to get the last laugh or the last one to strike, and he threatened that, I guess.” He went further still: “He just backs up and resorts to threatening violence. It’s a weird thing.”
Hill’s public response carried none of that detail. “NASCAR let us know what we need to do going forward,” he said. “We spoke. We had a conversation.” Nine words that told fans nothing and confirmed everything: the sport’s referees had decided these two needed supervision.
The Radio Call That Turned the Feud Inward
The latest flashpoint arrived at Kansas Speedway, where van Gisbergen slid in front of Hill on lap 110 of a 267-lap race to take 26th position. Hill hit the wall and dropped two more spots to Tyler Reddick and Alex Bowman, finishing 26th to van Gisbergen’s 24th, both a lap down to race winner Kyle Larson. On the surface, a minor incident buried deep in the running order of a race neither driver came close to winning. Underneath, it was the latest data point in a rivalry NASCAR has now had to intervene in twice.
What made Kansas different was who Hill turned on afterward. His spotter, Derek Kneeland, tried to talk him down in real time. “Settle down, all good here,” Kneeland said. Hill shot back immediately: “What do you mean, settle down? Ha!” Kneeland pressed the point, laying out exactly what both drivers stood to lose. “You can’t keep racing each other like this every week. We’re going to have destroyed cars and no finishes. Whether he’s being a dick or we are, we’ve got to be able to finish… Just keep it together.” Hill cut him off cold. “I don’t want to hear it. Honestly, I don’t want to freakin’ hear it from you. Just spot.” A spotter’s entire job is to be the calm voice in a driver’s ear at 180 miles an hour. Hill told his to be quiet.
Hill’s own account of the race made no mention of van Gisbergen at all. “Our car was really tight early and struggled on fire off,” he said. “We would drive back forward at the end of most runs.” A technical, almost bored assessment of a car that finished two laps down, delivered minutes after he had snapped at the one person in his ear whose job is to keep him out of exactly this kind of trouble.
It Started at Chicagoland and Never Actually Ended
Van Gisbergen and Hill first collided in a way that mattered back in July, at Chicagoland, in an incident serious enough that NASCAR summoned both drivers to discuss it before the sport ever got to Kansas. Van Gisbergen described his state of mind that day without much remorse. “I was racing hard and the outcome wasn’t what I wanted. I intended to run in there hard,” he said, before adding the one admission that separated him from Hill in the stewards’ eyes: “I definitely didn’t want to wreck a race car. I definitely didn’t want to escalate.”
That distinction, intent versus outcome, has defined how each driver talks about the other three months later. Van Gisbergen describes his own racing as hard but clean, a product of a Supercars career where door-to-door contact at 100 miles an hour was simply Tuesday. Hill, a Richard Childress Racing veteran who has spent years establishing himself as a driver who will not be pushed around, appears to hear every van Gisbergen pass as a challenge to his standing in the garage. Neither man has backed down in three months, and NASCAR’s two hauler meetings have done more to document the feud than resolve it.
Why Van Gisbergen Says He Has More to Lose
Van Gisbergen’s clearest comment on where this goes next doubled as a quiet warning shot. “I’m happy, but I’ve got the most to lose and he doesn’t, so who knows,” he said. It is a telling line from a driver who has spent three seasons building Trackhouse Racing’s reputation as a team that races with its head rather than its fists, now wondering aloud whether his restraint is being read as weakness.
He tried, at least publicly, to leave a door open. “I have to race with respect and start building that up and try to cut him brakes,” he said, before admitting the limits of that approach: “but if it doesn’t come my way I don’t know how to fix him.” That is not the language of a rivalry cooling off. It is the language of a driver who has run out of ideas for de-escalating one.
NASCAR’s officiating team now faces a familiar problem with a new pair of names attached to it. The sport has a long history of letting rivalries breathe, from Earnhardt-Gordon to Busch-Hamlin; fans tune in for exactly this kind of tension. But a spotter getting told to shut up on open radio, and a hauler meeting where one driver reportedly threatens the other, sit closer to the line where entertainment becomes a liability than most of the sport’s marketable feuds ever did. Hill and van Gisbergen are set to share a racetrack for the remaining Cup Series rounds of the season, including the playoff stretch where patience for petty payback runs thinnest. Whether either man treats the next pass between them as just another lap, or as the one Hill has been waiting to even the score on, is the question hanging over every lap they run together from here.
Rivalries like this one tend to follow a pattern in NASCAR history. Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch traded paint and words for the better part of a decade before either man publicly let it go. Denny Hamlin and Chase Elliott needed a full season of near-misses and a Charlotte wreck before cooling off. What separates Hill and van Gisbergen from those pairings, at least so far, is the imbalance in how each man talks about it. Harvick and Busch both played the villain gladly. Van Gisbergen sounds like a driver trying to de-escalate in public while still naming names, a harder position to hold than simply trading insults lap after lap. Whether that restraint survives a playoff elimination race, where a single bad finish ends a championship run, is the next real test of whether Kansas was the last word or just the latest one.
Sources:
