Only Yesterday: The Last Time Sonoma’s Storylines Happened in NASCAR

Sunday’s (July 13) Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway marked the third win of 2025 for road course ace Shane van Gisbergen. But every race has a story and van Gisbergen’s win is just one chapter in a weekend of notable storylines.

A closer look at the weekend brings out the details. A teenager kept van Gisbergen from sweeping two race weekends in a row. Van Gisbergen, a New Zealander, padded his status as the winningest international driver in NASCAR Cup Series history and took Red Bull back to victory lane as a primary sponsor — and in case you forgot, he’s a rookie.

Those stories alone make for a memorable weekend. But part of the reason someone will tell them somewhere down the road is because they build on other stories and bring back other memories. What’s old is new again, what’s new is all in the past. We remember this time because we remember the last time…

An international driver won in the Cup Series

OK, we don’t have to go back in time too far for this one. Only a year, in fact, because Daniel Suarez, who hails from Mexico, won the spring race at what’s now EchoPark Speedway, formerly known and still commonly referred to as Atlanta Motor Speedway. In the third-closest finish ever in the Cup Series at the time, Suarez beat Ryan Blaney and Kyle Busch to the line by .003 seconds in a thriller of a race.

Suarez also has a road course win at Sonoma in 2022, making him the only international Cup driver to win on both an oval and a road course and the most recent on either prior to van Gisbergen.

Before Suarez at EPS, the last foreign-born driver to win on an oval was Mario Andretti in the 1967 Daytona 500. Andretti is joined by Juan Pablo Montoya as winners in the Cup Series, IndyCar/Champ cars and Formula 1.

A Red Bull-sponsored Cup car went to victory lane

Prior to Sunday, it had been more than 13 years and 488 races since Red Bull gave a driver wings as a primary sponsor (the energy drink company was an associate sponsor for van Gisbergen on the Chicago street course a week previous to Sonoma).

In 2011, the next-to-last race of the year was held at Phoenix Raceway, and it was memorable for two reasons. One was that Carl Edwards would leave with just a three-point advantage over Tony Stewart in the title race. A week later, Stewart would win the title on a tiebreaker over Edwards in the closest championship finish ever (and unless the current playoff format is dropped, it can never happen again).

But the man of the hour was Kasey Kahne. Kahne beat Edwards by .802 seconds driving for Red Bull Racing with the team’s namesake on the hood of his No. 4. 

A week later, following the season finale, the team would shutter its shop and disappear from the NASCAR landscape.

It was Kahne’s 12th career win. He was not a part of the Chase for the title. He started 10th that day, the deepest he’d ever started for a win at that point in his career. Kahne moved to Hendrick Motorsports the following year, where he won six more times in his final seven seasons in NASCAR.

A teenager won a Xfinity Series race

On Saturday, Connor Zilisch held off van Gisbergen to win the Xfinity Series Pit Boss/FoodMaxx 250. It was the fourth series win for Zilisch, who is still a week shy of his 19th birthday.

As drivers are starting in racing at a younger age, winning in the Xfinity Series as a teenager is not completely unheard of, though it isn’t quite a regular occurrence. Before Zilisch in 2024, the last 18-year-old to roll into the winner’s circle was Sammy Smith, Zilisch’s JR Motorsports teammate, who won the spring race at Phoenix in 2023 at the age of 18 years, nine months and seven days.

The youngest driver to win in that series? That would be three-time Cup champion Joey Logano, who grabbed his first checkered flag just 21 days after his 18th birthday.

Somebody won more three road course races in a row

That somebody would be NASCAR’s most popular driver, Chase Elliott, who kicked off a four-race road course streak at Watkins Glen International and the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL in 2019 before taking both the Charlotte and Daytona International Speedway infield courses in 2020.

Van Gisbergen would have to win at Watkins Glen, the Charlotte ROVAL and the first road course of 2026 to tie the all-time record of six straight. That was set by another Hall of Fame driver, Jeff Gordon, whose nine road course wins are an all-time record. The Cup Series only had two road courses a year at the time, making piling up the wins extra impressive as drivers had fewer starts to do so. 

His first win on a road course came at Watkins Glen International in 1997. He swept both Sonoma and the Glen in 1998 and 1999 and followed it up with his sixth straight road course win at Sonoma in 2000.

More than one driver outside the top 16 made the playoffs

Van Gisbergen’s three wins will currently seed him among the top drivers in the playoffs, but overall, he’s currently 26th in overall driver points. Two other drivers, Austin Cindric and Josh Berry, also have wins and will make the playoffs despite being outside of the top 16 in points.

That seems like it should be a rarity, but having more than one driver outside the top 16 in the title hunt has been the trend in the last five years. Just last year, four drivers won their way in from the outside (Suarez, Chase Briscoe, Cindric and Harrison Burton). In 2020, 2021 and 2022, two drivers made the cut from the back end of the field. The only two drivers to do it twice from 2020 to 2024 are Briscoe and Austin Dillon. 

Prior to 2020, multiple drivers getting in on wins was rarer; it happened just twice. The last time all of the winners were also in the top 16 was 2019. 

The most drivers outside the top 16 to win their way into the title race in one year? For that, you have to go all the way back to the first year of the playoffs, 2014. Five drivers who would have missed the cut without a win muscled their way into the conversation: Denny Hamlin (who had missed a race due to injury and received a 75-point penalty six weeks before the end of the regular season, knocking him below the cut line), AJ Allmendinger, Kurt Busch, Kyle Busch and Aric Almirola.

Who was ousted at the 11th hour to make room for them? The unlucky drivers to fall victim to the first playoff cut were Clint Bowyer, Kyle Larson, Jamie McMurray, Dillon and Paul Menard. Ouch.

A rookie won three times in his first season

Van Gisbergen becomes the third rookie in Cup history to win three races in his first full-time season (he also won in 2023 in his debut). He currently leads the Rookie of the Year standings over Riley Herbst.

The others both went on to Hall of Fame careers and multiple titles. The most recent was seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson, who is also the only rookie to lead the point standings during the season. Johnson won at the now-defunct Auto Club Speedway and swept both races at Dover Motor Speedway (a harbinger of things to come as Johnson’s 11 Dover wins stand as the all-time record at the Monster Mile). Johnson went on to finish fifth in points.

Tony Stewart, already an IndyCar champion by the time he climbed into a Cup car, won the fall races at Richmond Raceway and Phoenix as well as the annual visit to Homestead-Miami Speedway, the same track where he’d wrap up his first title three years later. 

One last footnote on this one: while Stewart did win rookie honors in 1999, Johnson was not Rookie of the Year in 2002. That went to Ryan Newman, who won one race and six poles and finished sixth in points under different ROTY criteria than is used today.

That’s the thing about racing. Every race has its stories, and every story evokes even more of them. Every unique moment and achievement has something that came before which sets the bar and makes them something. For everything we have seen before and will see, there is another moment that will bring clarity. NASCAR’s past isn’t a timeline, it’s a tapestry.