Shane van Gisbergen’s triumph at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez was a beatdown of historic proportions that featured the largest margin of victory in a NASCAR Cup Series race since 2009.
The final restart of Sunday’s (June 15) Viva Mexico 250 came with 32 laps to go, and it didn’t take long for van Gisbergen to say adios to his competition.
The win was never in doubt during the final green flag run, but the field had managed to keep it somewhat close. With 14 laps to go, van Gisbergen’s lead over second-place Christopher Bell was up to three seconds.
It wouldn’t stay that way for long.
SVG ran smooth, clean laps in the first half of the final run and perhaps lured the competition into a false belief that they could keep up. He took care of his car while the rest of the field used up their brakes, tires and equipment trying to keep pace.
Something had to give, and the switch flipped with 15 laps to go. It was around then that everyone’s lap times fell off a cliff, and van Gisbergen started running laps more than a full second faster than the top five.
With 10 laps to go, van Gisbergen’s lead was up to 6.5 seconds. With eight to go, it the margin was 9.5 seconds. With five to go, he was more than 12 seconds ahead of second.
When it was all said and done, van Gisbergen took the checkered flag by a whopping 16.567 seconds over Bell for the third-largest margin of victory the series has seen in the last 30 years.
And as one could expect, the win also dwarfed the previous records for margin of victory on road courses in the same timespan.
But what makes van Gisbergen’s performance truly historic is that both the 25-second margin at Texas Motor Speedway in 2009 and the 22-second margin at Dover Motor Speedway in 1999 were the result of fuel mileage. In those races, Kurt Busch and Bobby Labonte respectively stretched their fuel in a way that no one else could.
Those performances are historic in their own right, too, but for entirely different reasons. Those margins — as well as the vast majority of the ones greater than 10 seconds — weren’t accomplished on pure speed. Van Gisbergen’s margin was, and it was a showing of pure speed that Cup hadn’t seen in more than three decades.
The last time a Cup driver won a race on speed with a margin greater than 16.5 seconds was the time that Geoff Bodine lapped the field at North Wilkesboro Speedway in 1994 (that race has an unofficial margin of 21 seconds).
Van Gisbergen straight up put on a performance Sunday that Cup hasn’t seen in more than three decades.
At the same time, a race has to have a perfect set of circumstances to even be capable of reaching the margins of victory seen on Sunday. If there was a caution at any point in the last 32 laps, the margin would’ve been nowhere close to 16.5 seconds.
Look no further than three months ago at Homestead-Miami Speedway, where Kyle Larson had a 16-second lead in the NASCAR Xfinity Series race that was wiped out by a caution with eight laps to go. To pour salt on the wound, he didn’t even win the race.
It takes a long run to the checkered flag, a great driver, a great car, perfect pit strategy and track position to win a Cup race on outright pace by more than a few seconds.
The stars don’t align for every dominant driver and car to run away with a race, but for the cards he was dealt, van Gisbergen’s run to the checkered flag in Mexico City is one of the most impressive displays of dominance we’ll see for a long, long time.
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf