This weekend, the NASCAR Cup and Xfinity Series will tackle the 1.99-mile Sonoma Raceway road course in Northern California.

The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series returns to action July 25 at Indianapolis Raceway Park.

NASCAR Cup Series’ Toyota / Save Mart 350

• Sunday, July 13
  • 3:30 p.m. (All times Eastern)
• 110 laps
  • Stages end on laps 25, 55, 110
• TNT (stream on Max), Performance Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Channel 90
• Last year’s winner: Kyle Larson

Unlike last week at Chicago, no drivers will fail to qualify with 37 drivers on the entry list (36 chartered, 1 open entry).

Katherine Legge will race the No. 78 Live Fast Motorsports Chevrolet for the second week in a row and her fourth start of 2025.

Odds for NASCAR Cup Series at Sonoma 2025

Chicago Street Course race winner Shane Van Gisbergen is the opening odds-on favorite to win Sunday, per Caesar’s Sportsbook. Kyle Larson, the 2024 winner at Sonoma, has the second-shortest odds.

Here are odds for select drivers for Sonoma as of Monday, July 7:

• Shane Van Gisbergen +175
• Kyle Larson +350
• Chase Elliott, Michael McDowell, Tyler Reddick +1000
• William Byron, Ty Gibbs +1400
• Chris Buscher +1600
• Christopher Bell+1800
• A.J. Allmendinger +2000
• Ross Chastain +2500
• Ryan Blaney +2800
• Alex Bowman, Kyle Busch +3500
• Chase Briscoe +4000
• Carson Hocevar, Joey Logano, Daniel Suarez +5000
• Denny Hamlin +6000
• Austin Cindric, Brad Keselowski, John Hunter Nemechek, Ryan Preece +7500
• The rest of the odds are coming soon.

NASCAR Xfinity Series’ Pit Boss/FoodMaxx 250

• Saturday, July 12
• 79 laps
  • Stages end on laps 20, 45, 79
• CW, Performance Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Channel 90
• Last year’s winner: Shane Van Gisbergen

One driver will miss the field with 39 entries for 38 spots.

Shane Van Gisbergen, the 2024 winner, and Riley Herbst are the only drivers slated for double-duty this weekend, with SVG piloting the No. 9 JR Motorsports Chevrolet and Herbst the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota.

Other notable entries include:

• Connor Mosack: No. 14 for SS-Greenlight Racing
• Brad Perez: No. 45 for Alpha Prime Racing

Dominic Aragon is currently the editor-in-chief for The Racing Experts.

From Grants, New Mexico, USA, Aragon started watching NASCAR in 2004 and has been covering the sport since 2009. Aragon is a 2012 graduate of Grants High School and a May 2016 graduate of the University of New Mexico with a B.A. in Mass Communications & Journalism. Aragon has worked in local and national media, as a musician, and an educator. He is co-author of the 2024 book “All of It: Daytona 500 Champion Tells the Rest of the Story” with racer Geoff Bodine.

Aragon, his wife Feliz, and son Christopher currently reside in Grants, New Mexico, USA.

You can reach Dominic at daragon@theracingexperts.net.

Drivers compete in a NASCAR Cup Series race at the Grant Park 165 on Sunday in Chicago.
(AP Photo/Erin Hooley)

CHICAGO (AP) — Shane van Gisbergen completed a sweep on the Chicago Street Course on Sunday, winning the NASCAR Cup Series race on the tricky downtown circuit.

It was van Gisbergen’s second victory of the season and his third career Cup win. The Trackhouse Racing driver also won in Chicago in 2023, becoming the first driver to take his Cup Series debut since Johnny Rutherford in the second qualifying race at Daytona in 1963.

Ty Gibbs was second, and Tyler Reddick finished third. Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch rounded out the top five.

It was a dominant weekend for van Gisbergen, a three-time champion in Australia’s Supercars. The 36-year-old New Zealand native won the Xfinity Series race from the pole Saturday. He also was the top qualifier for the Cup race.

Michael McDowell joined van Gisbergen on the front row and quickly moved in front. He won Stage 1 and led for 31 laps before he was derailed by a throttle cable issue.

Van Gisbergen regained the lead when he passed Chase Briscoe with 16 laps left. As fog moved into downtown Chicago with thunderstorms in the forecast, van Gisbergen controlled the action the rest of the way.

AJ Allmendinger was sixth, and Ryan Preece finished seventh. Ryan Blaney, who won the second stage, was 12th.

William Byron’s day was cut short by a clutch problem. The Hendrick Motorsports driver began the day on top of the series standings.

After McDowell seized the lead early in the race, Carson Hocevar caused a multicar crash when he hit the wall and spun out between Turns 10 and 11. Brad Keselowski, Austin Dillon, Daniel Suárez and Will Brown were among the drivers collected in the wreck.

“I didn’t see it until the last second,” Keselowski said. “I slowed down and I actually felt I was gonna get stopped and then I just kind of got ran over from behind. It’s just a narrow street course and sometimes there’s nowhere to go.”

Ty Dillon and Reddick moved into the third round of NASCAR’s inaugural in-season tournament when Keselowski and Hocevar were unable to finish the race. Dillon, the No. 32 seed, eliminated Keselowski after he upset top-seeded Denny Hamlin last weekend at Atlanta.

Gibbs, Preece, Alex Bowman, John H. Nemechek, Zane Smith and Erik Jones also advanced. The winner of the five-race, bracket-style tournament takes home a $1 million prize.

Bowman, the 2024 champion on the downtown street course, won his head-to-head matchup with Bubba Wallace. Bowman and Wallace made contact as they battled for position late in the race after they also tangled in Chicago last year.

What’s Happening?

Part-time NASCAR driver, Greg van Alst announced this morning that he is forming the new race team, Greg van Alst Motorsports. The team will field the number 35 truck part-time for the remainder of the 2025 season, beginning at Lucus Oil Raceway Park. Alst, 44, made his stockcar racing debut in the ARCA Menards Series in 2002. After a long sabadical, he returned to the series in 2021 and has race part-time ever since.

• Alst, best known for his ARCA win at Daytona in 2021, made some part-time starts earlier this season in the NASCAR Xfinity Series. Those starts were in the number 35 for Joey Gase Motorsports. His best finish this year was a 26th-place run at Daytona.
• The newly formed team plans to run four races. Its schedule will begin at Lucus Oil Raceway Park in Indianapolis. It will then be followed up by Bristol, Talladega, and Martinsville.
• The team will be run under the TRD banner. It will be interesting to see how they perform in the coming weeks.

Ryan Preece’s fifth top-10 finish in the last eight races moved him closer to a playoff spot after Sunday’s Chicago Street Race.

Preece finished seventh. Combined with Bubba Wallace’s late crash, Preece is now two points behind Wallace for the final playoff spot with seven races left in the regular season.

Wallace was running seventh with six laps left when contact with Alex Bowman caused him to crash. Wallace finished 28th, losing 21 points. That was the number of points Preece gained Sunday on Wallace.

A look at the winners and losers from Sunday’s Cup race at Chicago.

Shane van Gisbergen’s win Sunday — his second of the season — did not change the playoff standings. Twelve drivers have playoff spots via wins. That leaves four spots by points at this time.

The four drivers in a playoff spot via points are: Tyler Reddick (143 points above the cutline), Bowman (+39), Chris Buescher (+35) and Wallace (+2).

Those just below the cutline are: Preece (-2 points), AJ Allmendinger (-43), Kyle Busch (-46), Erik Jones (-50) and Ty Gibbs (-66), who finished second in Sunday’s race.

The Cup Series races Sunday at Sonoma Raceway.

Here is a look at the Cup playoff standings (drivers in yellow have a playoff spot with a win):

There’s a line about the pinball wizard in the Who’s rock opera “Tommy” that goes “What makes him so good?”

After Sunday’s Grant Park 165 on the Chicago Street Course, race fans, pundits and competitors alike were asking the same thing about Shane van Gisbergen.

The statistics speak for themselves. On road courses in the NASCAR Cup Series, Van Gisbergen has posted a win, two top fives and five top 10s. Most recently, he won the Mexico City race by an amazing 16.567 seconds over runner-up Christopher Bell.

On the Chicago Street Course (not included in road course stats), he has two victories in three attempts.

His numbers in the NASCAR Xfinity Series are even more daunting. In five road course starts, he boasts two victories and four top fives.

SVG has won the two Xfinity races he has run on the Chicago Street Course, both from the pole. On Sunday, he completed a weekend sweep of the Xfinity and Cup races, having won the pole for each event.

Kyle Busch, who finished fifth in Chicago, is the only other driver to have swept an Xfinity/Cup weekend after winning the pole for both races, a feat he accomplished at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in July 2016.

Trackhouse Racing owner Justin Marks, who fielded the No. 88 Chevrolet Van Gisbergen drove to victory on Sunday, had his own ideas about the New Zealander’s superiority.

“For me, in my experience driving race cars for 20 years, it’s his racing IQ,” said Marks, an accomplished road racer himself. “It’s how strategic he can think while he’s on the limit of the race car.

“A lot of drivers, it takes all of your mental bandwidth to drive the car fast, and Shane is one of these guys that can drive the car at the limit but be thinking bigger picture stuff. He knows where he is in the race, and he knows how to… he’s great at managing his tires, his equipment, all that kind of stuff.”

Clearly, SVG’s talents are ideally suited to the streets of Chicago.

“I think for his talent profile specifically, street races are just… they come very, very naturally to him,” Marks said.

“He’s got a lot of experience doing it in the V8 Supercars series, but I think in races like this, where everybody is working so hard just to get the apexes and get out of the corner in the right way and all of that, he does that just naturally while he’s thinking about bigger picture stuff, so he can really put the whole race together in a super impressive way.”

Stephen Doran is the crew chief who sets up the Cup cars to Van Gisbergen’s liking.

“You watch him, and he’s like a machine out there,” Doran said. “He makes no mistakes, and he just waits until somebody misses an apex in front of him and he pounces on them.

“He just drives through the field. You saw it (Saturday) and (Sunday). His laps are so consistent, and that’s part of why he saves his tires so well.”

There’s more to it than that. SVG is a three-time champion in Australian Supercars, a gritty series where no quarter is given. That same series also honed the skills of Marcos Ambrose, who enjoyed significant success on road courses after coming to NASCAR racing in 2006.

Fellow competitors saw how Van Gisbergen was willing to run JR Motorsports teammate Connor Zilisch wide in Turn 1 after the decisive restart in Saturday’s Xfinity Series race.

Cup driver Tyler Reddick took note.

“Obviously, I saw what Shane was willing to do to win the race on Saturday, and for us needing a win to lock ourselves into the Playoffs, I would have raced really hard, because I think he would have done the same,” said Reddick, who finished third after chasing Van Gisbergen and runner-up Ty Gibbs over the closing laps on Sunday.

“But it didn’t happen, but we can all dream and speculate what it could have been.”

Remarkably, SVG has adapted almost instantly to the road course versions of both the Gen 7 Cup car and the Xfinity car—two vastly different platforms.

To rise to Van Gisbergen’s level of excellence on road and street courses, competitors in both series not only have to sharpen their road racing skills but also must adopt a take-no-prisoners mentality to match his level of determination.

Otherwise, “What makes him so good?” will continue to be an often-asked question.