The Trackhouse Racing driver has been a force on road and street courses this year, winning two of the three to date at Mexico City and Chicago.

At the same time, results for the #88 Chevrolet Camaro on ovals have begun to improve.

By and large, van Gisbergen has spent much of the season on the outside looking in with a breakthrough top 10 yet to come.

Speaking on Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour, van Gisbergen said he doesn’t yet know what he needs from his car to bridge the gap in qualifying.

For the most part, as he wraps his head around the racing, he has left his crew chief to do the heavy lifting as far as car set-up goes.

The next step in van Gisbergen’s development is starting to understand what stock car-specific changes will affect the behaviour of his car.

It’s a chicken and issue situation, ultimately. With so little practice, van Gisbergen said he has very little time to test and tune.

That was a hallmark of his tenure in Supercar, taking his time in practice and building into the weekend. In NASCAR, practice and qualifying are more often than not back-to-back.

“It’s just a huge gap to try and find that next level and you just go in blind and hope it sticks. It’s hard to tell yourself to do that,” he explained.

“I’m trying to learn as much as I can and trying to learn what I like from the car when they’re talking about wedge changes or ride height and stuff like that.

“I don’t want to know what’s got a 1000 pound spring or a 2000, like that doesn’t matter to me, but I’d love to know if we go up 200 pounds on the rear spring, what it feels like or what it’s going to do.

“So I don’t want to know what’s in the car, but I want to understand it mechanically so I can help guide changes. That’s kind of what I’m doing on the road course and starting to learn what I need on the ovals.”

While the Cup Series cars made out to be “agricultural” in many ways, van Gisbergen said he was stunned by how technically advanced the on-track and off-track product was.

That’s something he said isn’t explained to fans of the sport.

“I had no idea about the technology in NASCAR,” he said.

“Because you make out that these cars are so basic and they’re agricultural and the tech that’s underneath them — I wish there was an exciting way to tell people about it or show people all the simulators and stuff.

“The tech side is kind of boring really to the average fan, but it’s mind-blowing. The detail and little intricate parts on the car to make speed and quality control and all the aero stuff. Seeing the things in the body scanner, how they’re manipulating everything.

“It’s years ahead of what I had back at home (in Supercars) and the story here doesn’t really get told that well about it.”

Van Gisbergen said that with the benefit of hindsight, some applications in the NASCAR Cup Series could be used in Supercars.

He suggested as much to his former Triple Eight race engineer Andrew Edwards, who recently attended the Chicago race to support Will Brown.

“Like I said to Andrew Edwards – he was my engineer or crew chief equivalent in Australia – he came over with Will Brown and I said, ‘I wish, if I went back there, I’d have so many ways now to make the cars faster with innovation’, I guess you’d call it.

“Grey areas, technology. It’s just stuff you don’t think of at home. You don’t push those limits because it’s not the normal thing to do. It’s not cheating, but it’s amazing the things people come up with here and you see things in the garage.

“You’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a bit different’. It’s a really cool sport how everyone pushes it. To me, it’s mind-blowing. You go to Chicago and the cars are sitting in tents out in the rain all together. All the cars just line-up under an easy up tent and out in the elements.

“It’s a pretty cool balance of how they’ve kept it old school but it has moved on too.”

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