Who… should you be talking about after the race?
For the second weekend in a row, Shane van Gisbergen won the pole for both the Xfinity and Cup Series races at Sonoma Raceway. He didn’t sweep the weekend this time after narrowly losing to Connor Zilisch in the Xfinity Series race on Saturday (July 12), but on Sunday (July 13), van Gisbergen rolled to his third straight road course victory.
It’s his third win of 2025 and second in a row after winning on the Chicago street course last week.
This week, van Gisbergen led 97 of 110 laps and beat Chase Briscoe to the line by 1.128 seconds to secure the win.
A pair of cautions in the final stage gave many teams a chance to pit for tires and make a run at van Gisbergen. A new tire compound was in play this week, one with significant wear that made fresh tires a bigger advantage than in the past. Chase Elliott was one of those who stopped for tires on a lap 96 caution, and while a dozen cars restarted between him and van Gisbergen, Elliott was able to make a late charge along with Michael McDowell.
Another caution slowed them down, and Elliott got into some gravel trying to close the gap, but the fresh tires proved to be important as the pair was able to drive through the field to finish third and fourth. Christopher Bell put together a solid run to finish fifth.
It’s van Gisbergen’s fourth career Cup Series win and third of 2025, putting him in a four-way tie with Kyle Larson, Denny Hamlin and Bell for the most this year.
On the other hand…
With a top-10 qualifying effort, Ryan Blaney was looking to improve on his 12th-place run last week in Chicago, but his roller coaster of a 2025 season continued.
A lap 62 spin sent Blaney into the grass. He was able to continue but finished 36th, four laps down. In his last eight races, Blaney has a win and a top three but also four finishes of 30th or worse. Blaney has speed, but he has six more weeks to find consistency before the playoffs.
What… does this mean for the points standings?
Not much changed at the top. William Byron leads Elliott by 14 points after Sonoma with Kyle Larson in third. Larson’s late spin at Sonoma drops home from 19 points out of the lead to 44.
Tyler Reddick and Hamlin swapped fourth and fifth spots, with Reddick moving up thanks to his sixth-place finish on Sunday. There was no change for sixth as Bell held the position over Blaney. Briscoe moves into eighth with his runner-up finish, moving Ross Chastain to ninth. Chris Buescher slides into 10th, taking the spot from Alex Bowman, who dropped two to 12th.
Bubba Wallace is currently the driver sitting on the playoff cut line. Wallace is 13th on the chart, just three points ahead of Ryan Preece, who has blossomed with RFK Racing this season.
The mover of the week was McDowell, who climbed four spots to 19th after his fourth-place finish in wine country.
Where… did he come from?
Brad Keselowski once used his self-introduction to call Kyle Busch an ass, but this week the two veterans both overcame mediocre qualifying runs to put together much-needed solid finishes.
Keselowski, who has admitted that road courses aren’t his strong point, started 21st but worked his way forward to finish 11th. 2025 has been a struggle for Keselowski, so a relatively uneventful day with a good finish was a welcome result for the 2012 champion.
Busch, who started 17th, used a little strategy to score a third-place finish in the second stage, adding a few points to the bank. Busch went on to finish 10th, his second top 10 in a row and also in the last five races.
When… was the moment of truth?
Did he or didn’t he?
NASCAR said that Ty Gibbs did nothing wrong when he clipped the tire in the arms of Keselowski’s crewman in the pit box before his. Drivers are entitled to pass through the box before theirs under the rules. Crewmen are also permitted to cross over the wall when the car they are pitting is three boxes away, as Keselowski was.
The question was whether Gibbs aimed at the crewman intentionally after an on-track tussle with Keselowski’s RFK Racing teammate Buescher.
From the overhead view, it didn’t appear that Gibbs moved out of his line towards the crewman. From the track level, it looked as though he might have. At the end of the day, he does have the right to drive through up to three boxes getting to his pit, so he was well within the rules, but Gibbs has shown he’s not always mindful of the crews on pit road.
Gibbs was penalized a couple of years ago for a pit road incident where he hooked Ty Dillon into a box where crewmen were waiting, so he’s got a history of ignoring the safety of pit crews.
Speaking of Dillon, the No. 32 seed continues to hang on in the in-season tournament, unseating Bowman this week. He didn’t do it in a particularly clean manner, shoving Bowman across traffic in turn 11, but the No. 48 couldn’t comeback from the launch, and Dillon moves into the semi-final round.
Why… should you be paying attention this week?
There are a couple of things to keep an eye on in the coming days. One, of course, is next week’s race at Dover Motor Speedway. Could we see a new winner there?
Maybe. Busch has the most wins among active drivers, and he’s certainly hungry for a W. Bowman is also a former Dover winner as is Keselowski, who is generally strong at the one-mile oval. If you like a dark horse, Cole Custer has been surprisingly strong in four previous starts with two top 10s and an 11.5 average finish, and Erik Jones has been solid there as well.
On the other hand, the top average finishers at the Monster Mile are Larson and Elliott, with averages inside the top 10 – so a new winner is not a foregone conclusion.
Unless something changes drastically this week, it could also be the first race that 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports compete without charters after a court defeat last week. While they’re unlikely to miss races by failure to qualify, the financial loss is significant as open teams get a far smaller piece of race purses and the season point fund than charter teams do.
How… did this race stack up?
NASCAR took away a lot of road course strategy with stage racing, and Sonoma has always been a strategy track, so it’s a place where the action has been hurt by both the stage cautions and the Next Gen car. To give credit where it’s due, NASCAR and Goodyear brought a tire where tire wear and conservation mattered, and that absolutely made the end of the race more compelling as Elliott and others who pitted for tires on the final caution were able to drive through the field. Elliott might have had enough speed for a run at the lead but got into some gravel.
On the other hand, fans got a better show from the Xfinity Series on Saturday. That series’ cars thrive on the road courses and short tracks, where the Next Gen has been totally lacking.
How long will NASCAR let its second series put on a better show than the Cup cars are currently capable of?
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.