CHICAGO — “This place has changed my life, so I’m gonna have special memories of this place forever”: Shane van Gisbergen, inaugural winner of the Chicago Street Race in 2023.
Van Gisbergen’s impressive victory set him on the path to NASCAR’s national series scene. He won three races as a rookie in the Xfinity Series a year later before getting the call to the Cup Series this season. Now competing at the sport’s highest level with a playoff spot secured, the New Zealander returns to the Windy City aiming to bounce back from last year’s performance on the 2.2-mile street circuit, where he exited early after a Stage 2 crash.
“We have them all circled going into the year,” Stephen Doran, van Gisbergan’s crew chief of the No. 88 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet, said after the Kiwi dominated Mexico City. “I don’t think we approach road courses any different than we do ovals. It’s max effort on every car, but we know with his skill set, if we just put him in position, he’s going to take care of business at these types of places.”
RELATED: Chicago weekend schedule | How to watch NASCAR on TNT Sports
What makes van Gisbergen special and hard to beat at turning left and right is his street smarts. Coming from an Australian Supercars background, he’s raced a great multitude of traditional road courses and street circuits, so much so that he even finds some familiarity in Chicago’s layout to tracks he’s won at from the land down under.
“It’s a bit like Gold Coast in some way, like the 90-degree corners and stuff, and Adelaide in some sections. But yeah, it’s different in its own way. The hardest part here is the no runoff, like Turn 1 and Turn 5; going straight into a wall at the biggest braking zones is pretty daunting. Normally, you have runoff in the tricky corners, so that’s probably the hardest part about this place. “
With the third annual Grant Park 165 slated for Sunday (2 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), van Gisbergen returns not only to the site of his NASCAR debut win but also as the main target. The rest of the Cup Series field has improved its road-racing chops in the past year — yet in the garage and on pit road, he’s still seen as the benchmark.
“This place is pretty cool to me. Every time I come back, I hate cities,” van Gisbergen joked. “But when you get here, it’s pretty cool. You know, I got great memories here.”