SVG Playoff Bound – Speedway Digest

With his win in the inaugural Mexico City race last weekend, Trackhouse Racing’s Shane Van Gisbergen has punched his first career ticket to the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs. The driver of the No. 88 Chevrolet won last week by more than 16-seconds, the largest margin of victory in a NASCAR Cup Serie race since 2009.

The 36-year-old New Zealander – a three-time Australian Supercars Series champion – insisted that having that “ticket” into the Playoffs would not really change the way he goes about competing this year – his first time running a full season.

Although he famously became the first driver in NASCAR history to win in his first career NASCAR Cup Series start at Chicago in 2023 – the Mexico City win was only his second top-10 of this season.

“I don’t think it really has [changed his mindset],” Van Gisbergen said of the victory. “It was always our goal to win. There’s probably less pressure on road courses now. We can play with our strategy if we want to try and get playoff points now and stuff like that.

“But yeah, probably less pressure. We can enjoy the road courses a bit more. But yeah, the ovals, we just need to keep doing what we’ve been doing; keep our head down, keep improving every week, and try and keep getting good results. We’ve been frustrated with top-20s the last couple of weeks, which is a huge improvement for us for how we started. Our potential is getting a lot better, and hopefully we keep getting close to that back-end of the top-10. That would be good.”