NASCAR drivers — at least according to those within its industry — are the best drivers in the world.
Many are quick to smear those who mock Formula 1 for claiming to have the best drivers in the world, while also unironically doing the same to NASCAR drivers.
During the NBC broadcast of the NASCAR Cup Series championship race last month, Rick Allen outright called Kyle Larson the best driver in the world. It was a jarring claim considering Formula 1 fans tuning in had just watched Max Verstappen score his 323rd win of the season in that series that morning, while Larson ended up not even winning the Cup championship.
Read all of Frontstretch‘s content looking back on 2023 here
The reality is there is no best driver in the world. It’s foolish to seriously argue there is one. It’s not the days of the 1960s, when guys like AJ Foyt, Mario Andretti and Dan Gurney dominated in anything into which they strapped themselves.
The world is much more specialized now, with the vast majority of major series drivers only focusing on their given series as a full-time job instead of ride hopping, save for maybe some endurance or dirt racing on the side.
But for years, guest drivers were locked out of NASCAR winner circles. Sure, a Boris Said here or a Ron Fellows there could get wins in the lower national series. But they had largely been around NASCAR forever by the time they were winning.
Guest drivers generally didn’t get a proper chance. A few rides are open at every road course race. But why waste a bunch of build-up time prepping for a race where at best, your equipment might get you to 15th?
Enter Justin Marks.
When Trackhouse Racing announced its Project 91 program, it made a big splash by signing former F1 champion Kimi Raikkonen to drive the first two races. For his experience level in stock cars, Raikkonen did a fine job, but it was still not satisfying. Raikkonen is now 44 years old and was fairly washed his last year in F1 in 2021.
In May 2023, Project 91 revealed its second driver: Shane van Gisbergen.
Van Gisbergen had been the best in Supercars down in Australia for years, winning race after race, championship after championship. He’s also had a very extensive history in touring cars and has even done both rallying and sprint car racing in recent years.
And there were few bigger stages on the NASCAR calendar for the van Gisbergen show to come to. The Chicago street race was not the first time NASCAR has raced on such a surface, but it’s definitely the only really significant instance since the final race at the old Daytona Beach and Road Course.
The third-largest media market in the country, in one of the nicest parts of the city and on a major holiday weekend? Just having the race weekend was a big win for NASCAR. Even if the weekend was a disaster — and it almost was — being able to land that good of a slot is remarkable for the first real street course deal.
The buildup to the race was pretty embarrassing in some corners of the NASCAR community. People legitimately thought that there would be shootings and violent crime surrounding the race because Chicago bad.
This ignored the fact that multiple major sports teams have their stadiums or arenas right near by Grant Park, or that crime rates indicate it is significantly more likely to be a victim of a violent crime at Myrtle Beach than in Chicago.
The reality is that the lone security problem the entire weekend was a car getting onto the race course on Saturday night. A monsoon of rain canceled many of the weekend’s concert events, but once the rain finally went away, the event ended up being more of a success than many predicted it would be.
One thing not many noted in comparison was van Gisbergen being in the race. That changed quite a bit on Saturday, when he turned heads with the fastest lap in practice, followed by qualified third for the race. Even still, he was still just a +1600 underdog to win the race, per the Bet MGM Sportsbook.
I asked two of our Frontstretch reporters that were on the scene, Bryan Nolen and Michael Massie, about the atmosphere surrounding van Gisbergen on Saturday.
“I had no idea who he was before the weekend,” Nolen recalls. “But after practice, people were like, well, damn, he could contend for a top five! But I didn’t hear anything [about him possibly winning the race]”.
“So my experience was different because I was already familiar with SVG,” Massie remembers. “Learned who he was from racing against him in iRacing and then learned how good he was in Australia after that. I thought he would be a top 10 contender because the cars are similar. … The moment I thought he could win actually was when Chase Elliott went out behind him [in qualifying] and tried to follow his line. Elliott is supposed to be one of the best road racers in Cup and he wrecked trying to follow SVG.”
Sunday was raceday, and it was almost a full disaster. Rain pelted the area around the racetrack all night and all day. NASCAR had to sidestep its own rules and declare the curtailed NASCAR Xfinity Series race official despite it being prior to the halfway mark. The pit lane even flooded at one point.
And yet, the rain stopped just in time for a Hail Mary effort to start the race. Van Gisbergen focused on surviving throughout the opening laps, as he wasn’t used to the rain tire whatsoever.
After the now-infamous traffic-jam caution on lap 50, van Gisbergen began to drive through the field. On fresher tires than many of the cars ahead of him, he either passed or held off the very best that NASCAR had to offer.
“Holy shit, this guy is flying,” Larson said after the fact as far as his thoughts watching van Gisbergen’s march. “I felt like I pieced together a really good section and I thought for sure I’d look in the mirror and I was going to be like two car lengths or something in front of him. … [Instead], he was glued to my back bumper.”
With 10 scheduled laps to go, van Gisbergen had moved up to third after restarting 18th on lap 53. This was about the time that he, for a lack of a better term, got serious and went Super Saiyan. He was 1.2 seconds faster than Elliott in second and 1.6 seconds faster than race leader Justin Haley.
An already befuddled NBC announcing crew, most of whom didn’t even have enough respect for the Kiwi to learn how to pronounce his name prior to the race, stayed audibly flummoxed.
Right as he was about to take the lead from Haley, another caution came out. On the restart, a valiant effort by Haley to hold off the irresistible force came up short. Van Gisbergen then simply drove away from the field, then did the same on a green-white-checkered restart a few laps later.
The reality is that once the time came to win the race, there wasn’t one. Van Gisbergen took some of the most acclaimed drivers in the U.S. and made them look like rookies. There wasn’t much space devoted in this article about the actual race because, quite simply, it was academic. Van Gisbergen could have led almost every single lap if he absolutely needed to.
He returned later in the summer to race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, while also competing at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park for his first oval start in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. Van Gisbergen wasn’t quite as invincible at Indianapolis due to a variety of factors, but he was able to at least finish a solid 10th.
With a move to NASCAR locked in months ago, it wasn’t until December that there was finally confirmation on van Gisbergen’s schedule for 2024. He’ll be full time in the NASCAR Xfinity Series and will run a handful of Cup races.
But guest drivers are not just going away from Cup with van Gisbergen becoming a NASCAR regular. There was a massive amount of guest drivers at Indianapolis, including such stars as Kamui Kobayashi and eventual 2023 Supercars champion Brodie Kostecki in the field.
And with both Kostecki and Cam Waters reportedly set to run Cup races in 2024 in race winning equipment, the lesson van Gisbergen has brought to NASCAR may well be reinforced more and more going forward. After all, he outright stated after the race that the top 10 Supercars drivers could do exactly what he had just done.
As for both van Gisergen and street racing, the sky is the limit in the years ahead. Chicago should have been a massive wake-up call to a lot of tracks on the Cup schedule that put on boring racing, in much the same way van Gisbergen should be for NASCAR loyalists.
Why go to a track like Texas Motor Speedway when NASCAR can put up some barriers in downtown Dallas and have a significantly more interesting race? It’s not advisable to go the F1 route of making half the schedule on public road, but this race weekend was such a big success that it’s hard not to see more in the future.
The enduring legacy of this race, however, will be that a star was born. Van Gisbergen is going to be a fun add to NASCAR in the coming years, even if he proves medicore on ovals.
It’s yet another feather in the cap of Marks, who is in the middle of building a potentially formidable four car squad between current Trackhouse drivers Ross Chastain and Daniel Suarez, along with developmental drivers van Gisbergen and Zane Smith.
Entering 2024, there are some decent arguments that van Gisbergen may well be the best in the world. But unlike some drivers, he doesn’t need to rely on it. He just goes out and wins in whatever he gets in.
Michael has watched NASCAR for 20 years and regularly covered the sport from 2013-2021, and also formerly covered the SRX series from 2021-2023. He now covers the FIA Formula 1 World Championship, the NASCAR Xfinity Series, and road course events in the NASCAR Cup Series.