Van Gisbergen clinched his sixth career win in NASCAR’s second division at Sonoma, dominating the contest from start to finish.
The New Zealander came into the weekend level with Marcos Ambrose, who won five times between 2008 and 2014 across 77 starts.
Five of those road course wins were at Watkins Glen, with his only other triumph at Montreal in 2011.
Van Gisbergen has already beaten that benchmark in 39 starts.
He does, however, have some way to go before becoming the best of all-time.
AJ Allmendinger has the most NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series road course race wins with 11 to his name.
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“Pretty amazing day, right from the start I could feel that the changes of the car were better and was able to manage the gap at the start,” said van Gisbergen of his latest Sonoma success.
“We flipped both stages trying to keep the track position. I was a bit surprised that the #1 car (Connor Zilisch) didn’t at the second stage.
“Then it was just fuel-saving mode and trying to manage. The car was amazing.”
Van Gisbergen has a chance to become the equal second most successful road course racer in NASCAR Cup Series history on Monday.
As it stands, he sits level with Hendrick Motorsports’ Chase Elliott on seven wins. Only Tony Stewart (eight) and Jeff Gordon (nine) are ahead.
Van Gisbergen, who will start the Cup Series race from sixth, said the team has room to improve his Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet Camaro.
“My car was pretty subpar, to put it nicely,” van Gisbergen explained.
“We definitely need to improve it. It was a bit of a struggle really. I’m not sure how much [being in] group one affected us.
“Obviously we were. Pretty reasonable out of group one and there were some good cars in there, but people smoked us in group two – so we need to make some improvements.
“In the areas we can adjust we can make big improvements. It’s just the magnitude of how much to go, but we’ve had bad cars before and made them come alive on Sunday.
“I’m pretty confident my guys can make it better and yeah, should be a bit of fun trying to move forward.
“I was able to download as much as I could and especially not getting the pole gave us a bit more time,” he added.
“I try and do it straight away because I forget after doing another whole race, I forget what happens. I gave as much detail as I could earlier today.”
Van Gisbergen enters Monday’s race needing to dig himself out of a hole.
He elected not to take stage points at San Diego and paid the price when he was wrecked during a restart.
Below the cut line, van Gisbergen said he’s in a sticky spot trying to maximise the opportunity ahead.
“That’s always the tough thing. You want to score stage points, but then you can bury yourself in the pack. You can’t really strategise around it,” van Gisbergen explained.
“We were at the front of the pack last week and it happened, so it’s just one of those things – that’s racing and in the Cup Series ,it’s crazy.
“Every restart and every big moment like that, everyone’s fighting for everything they can get
“You’ve just got to manage it yourself and it’s risk versus reward as always.”
The NASCAR Cup Series Toyota/Save Mart 350 gets underway at 5:30am AEST.
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