Admit it. For a moment, you thought there was a chance that Shane van Gisbergen might lose Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway, didn’t you? Well, despite a challenge from Chase Briscoe, who hounded SVG over the final few circuits of the race, the New Zealander held steady and took home his second win of the season and eighth career NASCAR Cup Series victory.
Race Results: 2026 Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma
SVG, who was disappointed by a crash that ended his bid to win last weekend’s Street Race at Naval Base Coronado, was proud of his No. 97 Trackhouse Racing team for making sweeping changes to his race car overnight, which allowed the sixth-place qualifier to have a car capable of contending for the win.
“Yeah, what a day. We were really bad yesterday, and these guys did an amazing job turning this car into a winner,” van Gisbergen explained. “[Briscoe] was coming. He was really, really good, and I ran out at the end. But thank you to Red Bull, Trackhouse, Chevy. Pretty special to make up for last week, too.”
While it was a bit closer of a contest than we’re used to seeing from SVG in a late-race clinching situation at a road course, the driver said a lot of his struggles in the closing laps of the race were due to lapped traffic dirtying up the track ahead of him.
Van Gisbergen was glad there were only 110 laps on the docket for Sunday afternoon.
“Yeah, we had these shit boxes come out in front, and they were wobbling all over the track and putting dust, and I just kept struggling,” van Gisbergen said. “Chase [Briscoe] was just really, really good. Yeah, a couple more laps, we would have had some problems.”
Van Gisbergen led a race-high 74 laps in the 110-lap event, and he was able to cross the finish line ahead of Briscoe by a slim margin of 0.357 seconds. And with his latest win, van Gisbergen was able to vault himself back inside the top-16 of the Chase Grid. With eight races remaining in the regular season, SVG sits 36 points to the good.
“It certainly helps, but I need to really step it up on the ovals,” van Gisbergen said of his Chase aspirations. “We all do. Yeah, certainly helps us, but this is an oval championship, and I need to keep getting better at them.”
With his eighth career NASCAR Cup Series road course victory, SVG tied Tony Stewart for the second-most all-time. Van Gisbergen trails Jeff Gordon, who had nine road course wins in his illustrious career, by one road course win for the all-time lead.
While finishing runner-up to SVG with the No. 97 in your field of vision would usually be a win for NASCAR Cup Series drivers, Briscoe couldn’t help but be frustrated, because he felt he had the car he needed to win the race late in Sunday’s event at Sonoma Raceway. Yet, he came up empty-handed.
“It was odd. Not very many people get that close to him at the end of one of these road course races,” Briscoe said. “Yeah, just frustrated with myself. I felt like I definitely had the better car. I didn’t do as good of a job as he did driving. I just made a mistake with, like, three or four [laps] to go getting into [Turn] 1. I was having to push so hard, and that was where I would make up my ground. It was just such a razor’s edge, and I about crashed.
Briscoe continued, “I was able to obviously run him back down at the end. If I don’t make that mistake, I’m probably ahead of him, I feel like at the end. So, yeah, just bummed that at the end of the day it was my fault we didn’t win, but amazing car. [My Crew Chief] James [Small] and the group just did an amazing job.”
Ty Gibbs, who had a phenomenal points day, ended his excellent afternoon with a third-place result.
The driver, who started from the pole position, led every lap in the opening Stage of the race, and used strategy to take the Stage 2 win. The two Stage wins allowed Gibbs to bank an additional 20 championship points, and then he got a solid podium finish to go along with it.
Gibbs was able to scoot forward in the championship standings from fifth to fourth with his solid race.
Kyle Larson, a two-time Sonoma Raceway winner, would finish fourth, and he was followed across the finish line by Christopher Bell, who put in an impressive fifth-place performance while still healing from a fractured left wrist suffered in a hard crash at Michigan International Speedway a few weeks ago.
Ryan Blaney, Connor Zilisch, Ryan Preece, Michael McDowell, and Alex Bowman rounded out the top-10 finishers in the race.
For Zilisch, who has had a frustrating rookie campaign, this marked his first career NASCAR Cup Series top-10 finish.
Tyler Reddick, the point leader coming into the day, suffered power steering issues, which derailed his afternoon and caused him to finish four laps off the pace in last place (36th). Denny Hamlin was in position to take over the point lead as a result, but Hamlin was spun from the seventh position in an incident involving Carson Hocevar and Brad Keselowski in Turn 7 late in the event.
Hamlin would battle back to finish 26th, which would allow him to assume the point lead, but he carries just a one-point advantage over Reddick exiting Sonoma.
However, a potentially bigger deal for Hamlin was that he was able to defeat Ty Dillon, who finished 35th, to take the head-to-head win in his opening round matchup in the NASCAR In-Season Tournament.
Next up for the NASCAR Cup Series is the eero 400 at Chicagoland Speedway on Sunday, July 5. That race will be televised on TNT, and coverage of the event will kick off at 6:00 PM ET. The Motor Racing Network (MRN) and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide the radio broadcast of the race.
