Shane van Gisbergen doesn’t do dry spells at road courses. However, going into Saturday’s NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Focused Health 250 at Circuit of the Americas, the driver had never scored a win at the 2.4-mile road course, whether in O’Reilly or Cup Series competition before.
He changed that with a decisive victory, driving the No. 9 Chevrolet for JR Motorsports. Van Gisbergen led a race-high 31 laps in the 65-lap event, and he was able to hold a pretty wheel throughout the duration of the closing laps to polish off a win over Austin Hill by 0.780 seconds.
Race Results: Focused Health 250
To finally toss the COTA monkey that had been riding on his back was a major relief for the New Zealand native.
“Yeah, good to finally execute, we had an awesome day,” van Gisbergen said. “Thank you to SafetyCulture and JR Motorsports, the pit crew was awesome, you know, the strategy worked out well.”
Van Gisbergen continued, “What an awesome day, glad to finally win here. Hopefully, we can have a good day tomorrow.”
While van Gisbergen dominated the race, he admits he had slight concern over how the final restart of the race would play out with around five laps to go. However, after slight contact with Sam Mayer, the path cleared up for him to cruise to the win.
“I wondered what was going to happen on that last restart, and I kind of sucked [Mayer] in, and he took everyone out for me, so that was cool,” van Gisbergen quipped.
Hill, the driver of the No. 21 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet, continued his great start to the 2026 season. Hill won the season-opening event at Daytona International Speedway and was in contention to win last weekend at EchoPark Speedway until he received contact from Ross Chastain, which sent him sliding back on the final lap of the race.
While he finished second on Saturday, he admits, he didn’t have quite enough for van Gisbergen.
“I mean, I just got beat up, man-to-man,” Hill stated. “He was just better than me over those five laps. I had a great restart. I could have done a little bit better by staying tight to the guy in front of me. Maybe that doesn’t let him get down in front of me.”
Sammy Smith came home with a third-place finish ahead of defending series champion Jesse Love and Corey Day, the fifth-place finisher who angered Connor Zilisch with a late-race incident.
Brent Crews, William Sawalich, Justin Allgaier, Ross Chastain, and Brennan Poole rounded out the top-10 finishers in the race.
