Shane van Gisbergen once again did what Justin Marks and Trackhouse Racing hired him to do Sunday on the streets of Chicago.
Van Gisbergen swept the weekend between the Xfinity Series and Cup Series events. He has won two of the three Cup Series races he’s contested in the city, and is undefeated in the Xfinity Series at the course.
The victory is also van Gisbergen’s second this season in the Cup Series, further solidifying his spot in the postseason. Van Gisbergen, his crew chief Stephen Doran and the No. 88 team went to victory lane less than a month ago on the Mexico City road course.
It means the Kiwi and company are two-for-three on left-and-right courses this season.
“I don’t know that I feel pressure,” Doran said of giving van Gisbergen cars that he can win with on the road and street courses. “It’s excitement knowing that if our team does our job, we have a good shot at it, and that’s what I preach to our guys before the race – just execute, smooth, on pit stops, nothing fancy; just get your job done and let him go back out there and do his thing.
“Our guys have been great in Mexico and here executing all day. The strategy was good. It was just two solid, solid days.”
Marks chimed in after Doran’s answer with a similar sentiment.
“I was going to find Stephen before the race, and I ran out of time and couldn’t find him, but it’s like, in these positions, when you’ve got a guy like Shane, you don’t have to push or get cute or anything like that,” Marks said. “It’s just about doing your job well, whether it’s the pit crew or Stephen running the strategy or whatever. It’s just not putting yourself in a position to make mistakes and push too hard.
“[Go] do the job and do it well and let the driver go do his thing.”
Van Gisbergen started from the pole in both races. On Saturday, he was driving for JR Motorsports, as Trackhouse Racing has formed a relationship with the Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kelley Earnhardt Miller organization where Trackhouse Racing drivers are fielded in select races. Connor Zilisch, its development driver, also competes in the series full-time in a JR Motorsports car.
Between the two races, van Gisbergen led 53 of 125 laps.
Marks expanded to three cars this season for van Gisbergen to join the field alongside Ross Chastain and Daniel Suarez because of the number of road and street courses on the schedule. There are six total, but five of them are in the regular season. The series shifts to Sonoma Raceway next weekend.
“It’s a unique project with Shane, and we wouldn’t be doing this if we thought, ‘OK, we can go win road courses, and then we just know we’re not going to run that good on the ovals because he’s never done it before,’” Marks said. “At this level of the game, you have to be a complete package, and for his level of intelligence and how he studies and how he adapts and how he learns, there is a real opportunity for him to figure the ovals out and get fast at the ovals and be a complete Cup driver. I think we’ve seen him coming that way just in the last month and a half – he’s pretty consistently top 20 now on the ovals when he started running 30th or 32nd, and I think that development is going to continue.
“When you think about the project, we’ve got somebody who’s talented and that we can make a Cup driver out of, and while he learns in the meantime, we can win a ton of road courses and punch that ticket to the playoffs and give our sponsors a ton of return for their investment.”
