There are so many superlatives that could describe van Gisbergen’s season to date, but bumpy is perhaps the best. His recent results sheet is a real rocks-and-diamonds affair.
A win at Watkins Glen gave him a big boost in his performance metric, and when qualifying for the Charlotte and Nashville races were washed out he was given good starting spots.
He made the most of those opportunities to bag valuable points, including a career-best Cup Series oval finish of fifth place at Nashville.
However, when regular service resumed, van Gisbergen’s qualifying troubles returned and he was bogged down the back.
Pegged to the bottom of the order by his lacklustre qualifying, van Gisbergen found himself in strife and crashed out at Michigan and Pocono.
With no more road courses on the schedule to claw his way forward, van Gisbergen is cognisant that the next eight races are vital.
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“Now I just have to do my best every week and keep improving – don’t do anything stupid, just accumulate points,” said van Gisbergen.
“I can’t get in stupid accidents like Pocono with people. Tenth to 15th is good enough for us and better if we can and try and get stage points. That’s always been something difficult I’ve found on ovals.
“Qualify well, start up front, and hopefully we get better. It’s gotta be consistent finishes every week and having a points mentality will hopefully get us in there.”
Van Gisbergen is well aware that ovals are his shortcoming, but his Trackhouse Racing teammates Ross Chastain and Connor Zilisch haven’t had it easy either.
Zilisch, who was dominant in NASCAR’s second division, hasn’t scored a top 10 on an oval this season.
Chastain, meanwhile, is searching for his first win since last year’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte.
Halfway into the season, Chastain has almost as many finishes outside the top 20 as he had for the duration of 2025.
“Some weeks I find that we can run 10th to 15th pretty easily and other weeks it’s a battle to run 30th,” van Gisbergen explained.
“As a team, we definitely need to be better and prepare as well as we can.
“Open practice will certainly help us next week [at Chicagoland]. We can try something.
“I just need to keep getting better and make no mistakes and it’d be really cool to point our way in.
“We just need to improve. I’m still the weak link as a driver, but I’ve got good teammates in the other cars and they’re struggling as well.
“We all as a team need to improve and it’s just gonna come through hard work and trying to emulate what the other Chevys are doing.
“They’ve really stepped up the last couple of months and we need to do the same.”
Van Gisbergen’s crew chief Stephen Doran said San Diego and Sonoma were weekends the #97 team “needed” to be good.
They left San Diego without any points after crashing but bagged 64 points at Sonoma.
Now the team’s attention switches to stitching together complete performances on ovals, beginning with qualifying well.
“I told a few people earlier, what we need is better qualifying to be able to start better in some of these races,” Doran explained.
“We proved that in Nashville and Charlotte, like if we can qualify up there, we can stay up there all day. That’s just the last piece of the puzzle with the ovals is to qualify good, and just maintain that all day.
“That’s the focus going forward is to just work on practice, qualifying, unloading a little bit closer on the car side and just getting the initial speed in practice to carry over to qualifying to be able to start up front and stay there all night.
“I feel like we have the speed at the intermediates to maintain that. We’ve just got to start better, be able to get stage points like we did at the few races we started up front.
“We’re just pushing like hell to get there – get our qualifying better so we can get stage points and race up there all night.”
The NASCAR Cup Series continues on July 6 at Chicagoland.
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