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Van Gisbergen excited to return to ovals

van gisbergen

By Thomas Miles

Date posted: 17 July 2025

Despite having smashed the NASCAR Cup Series stars on road courses across the last fortnight, Shane van Gisbergen is looking forward to continuing his learning on the ovals.

Van Gisbergen is the name on everyone’s lips in America at the moment, having taken convincing back-to-back wins at Chicago and Sonoma.

But now things will get much harder this weekend as NASCAR returns to the infamous “Monster Mile” in Dover.

Despite now being the equal-winningest driver of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series, van Gisbergen is under no illusions about the challenge that still lies ahead of him on the ovals.

Having never seen one before 2023, SVG is slowly catching up to the rest as he learns the unique style.

Dover is an outlier, being a fast one-mile track with steep 24-degree banking that has been an annual fixture on the NASCAR calendar since back in 1969.

Van Gisbergen’s only previous start at Dover was in the Xfinity Series last year when he finished 18th.

The Kiwi knows building oval experience is the most important part of his NASCAR journey and hopes the recent wins will give him a further boost.

“I’m looking forward to getting back into some oval racing,” he said. 

“It’s been a nice break doing all these road courses, but Dover should be good. 

“I struggled a bit there last year, but I still had fun. It’s an epic track! Just how fast you can go into that corner, it feels like you are dropping and then all of the sudden you are loading up into the banking, just how much grip the track has is mind blowing. 

“My team has a bunch of momentum heading into this weekend, so I’d like to keep that progression going and keep starting to build towards the top half of the field on the ovals.

“It was a tough start to the year. But we built up all year, got better and better, and now we need to keep getting better on the ovals and start proving some people wrong.”

In the aftermath of smoking them at Sonoma, van Gisbergen has been compared to Michael Jordan by runner-up Chase Briscoe due to his dominance on road courses.

“It’s amazing that people and all my peers think that about me,” SVG said with a laugh. 

“I really enjoyed racing him (Briscoe) and I always do. 

“It’s been a really cool run that we’ve been on. 

“Being able to win on speed and executing perfectly, it’s really cool. 

“The battles I’ve had with everyone have been great. It’s just really cool that they think of me like that.”

The Dover race is at 4.00 AEST Monday morning.

Image: HHP/Tom Copeland

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