Shane van Gisbergen, who suffered crashes in the opening two races of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season at Daytona and Atlanta, finally had a clean race in Sunday’s EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas, and he walked away with a solid sixth-place finish.
SVG, who is always expected to run near the front in road course events, led the race on five occasions for a grand total of 23 laps. The driver would hold the lead near the end of Stages 1 and 2, but would opt to pit prior to the end of the Stages to set himself up for a hopeful shot at the overall race win.
While it looked like he’d play a factor for the win, the Trackhouse Racing driver lost a lot of ground on the restart at the beginning of the final Stage, and he just didn’t have the track position he needed after that to make a charge for his second career win in the closing laps of the race.
Still, the New Zealand native was able to avoid a lot of the carnage in the final handful of laps to secure his first top-10 finish, and the best finish by a NASCAR Cup Series rookie so far this season. On the strength of the run, SVG will head into this weekend’s Shriners Children’s 500 at Phoenix Raceway in a position he hasn’t been yet, the lead of the NASCAR Cup Series Rookie of the Year standings.
Riley Herbst, who has been ultra-consistent, literally as he has finished 17th in each race this year, entered Austin, TX with a 22-point advantage over van Gisbergen in the Rookie of the Year battle. While Herbst encountered another decent 17th-place run on Sunday, SVG finally had a peak to line up next to his two finishes that represented a large valley, which allowed him to overcome the point deficit.
Who will come out on top of the NASCAR Cup Series Rookie of the Year standings at the conclusion of Sunday’s race at Phoenix Raceway? That remains to be seen, but for now, SVG has the advantage in what has been a see-saw battle between him and Herbst through the opening three races of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season.
