Shane van Gisbergen sweeps NASCAR weekend in Chicago

Shane van Gisbergen continues to dominate the street courses on the NASCAR circuit and his latest achievement is sweeping the weekend in Chicago.

A day after he won the NASCAR Xfinity race on Saturday, van Gisbergen held off a late push from Ty Gibbs and Tyler Reddick to win the NASCAR Grant Park 165 on the Chicago Street Course. He swept the weekend by winning the pole for both races and then going out and winning the races.

It was an impressive achievement for the New Zealander who won the race in 2023 as well.

“What an amazing weekend for me. Lucky guy to drive some great car,” Shane van Gisbergen said after the race. “I thank Trackhouse, WeatherTech Chevy and all these guys and girls here, what an amazing weekend. … There were some really fast cars, and we just seemed to get it right and make no mistakes, be smooth every lap. Really cool. … It was very hot this weekend. The track was very slick and the times were a lot slower and the margin for error was very tiny.”

After taking the lead on lap 60, van Gisbergen then took the checkered flag under caution with Cody Ware plowing into the Turn 6 tire barrier. With the flag coming out, van Gisbergen already had the lead and cruised on that final lap for the win.

Tyler Reddick faces déjà vu in NASCAR Chicago street race

As Reddick watched van Gisbergen take the checkered flag, it felt like if there were five laps left, he would have won the race. That was a similar feeling to what happened last year when he ran out of time chasing down the eventual winner Alex Bowman.

Reddick was running a second faster near the end of the race and was hoping to catch van Gisbergen but instead, he finished third with Gibbs taking second. 

“Each year we’ve been here, the situation has kind of been the same,” Reddick said. “We’ve had some sort of tire advantage all three years and just come up a little bit short. The first year obviously we came up big short because I just drove it in the tire barrier into 6. But this time around, the last five, six laps were really good.”

“We just on that second to last restart, the 8 got — I think it was the 8. A couple cars got turned around and we were in the wrong lane and had to check up quite a bit. Cars that were on our similar strategy got ahead of us, so I had to — took me a few laps to get by those cars on equal tires before we could start chewing through those cars on older tires. Had to be aggressive”

There was good news for Reddick as he advanced to the quarterfinals of the NASCAR in-season tournament, moving on and looking to punch his ticket to the Final Four in the bracket style format.

NASCAR will stay on the street race circuit with next weekend’s event in Sonoma, California.