Shane van Gisbergen might be entering his first NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs campaign as the most lightly regarded four-race winner in recent memory. Chalk some of the shorter shrift up to his designation as a Cup Series rookie, even one with veteran credentials, but also for his role as a road-course specialist and a relative newbie on oval tracks.
Either way, van Gisbergen seems OK with it.
"It's always fun to have your back against the wall, right, and have to push hard," the 36-year-old New Zealander said during Wednesday's Cup Series Playoffs Media Day rounds. "I don't use it for motivation or anything, but it's cool being the underdog."
Van Gisbergen enters the 10-race postseason as one of the field of 16's largest question marks heading into Sunday's Cook Out Southern 500 (6 p.m. ET, USA Network, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App) at the historic Darlington Raceway. He joins a handful of others with aspirations of making a deep charge into the elimination-style bracket in spite of how their spot in the Cup Series standings might favor them.
Van Gisbergen - who finished the regular season 25th in points before the standings were re-seeded - dashed onto the playoff grid with four dominating victories on road courses, prevailing in Mexico City, Chicago, Sonoma Raceway and Watkins Glen International in order. His next prime road-race opportunity comes in the Round of 12 finale at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval, meaning he'll have to survive the oval gauntlet of Darlington, World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway and Bristol Motor Speedway to advance past the opening round.
Trackhouse Racing teammate Ross Chastain says he's seen strides from SVG on the oval tracks that make up the majority of the Cup Series schedule. Though van Gisbergen has yet to post a top-10 finish on an oval this year, Chastain said his teammate's progress is enough to boost his company-wide confidence.
"The gap from the 1 to the 88 on the ovals has shrunk," said Chastain, using the car numbers belonging to him and his teammate. "If we're fast, I expect him to be right there with us. He's put the time in and learned the cars. You'll always be better with more experience, but there's enough there that if Trackhouse performs the way we want to, he can make a lot of people wrong, and one of them won't be me. I expect him to be right there with me wherever I'm at."
Other one-time winners face similar questions about their postseason expectations. On his "Actions Detrimental" podcast, Denny Hamlin was asked which four drivers would be the first to be eliminated from playoff contention. His answers: Josh Berry, Austin Cindric, Austin Dillon and van Gisbergen. Those same four also dwell at the lower end of the oddsmakers' betting boards for the Cup Series championship.
"Guess we'll have to watch, won't we?" Cindric said with a smile after learning of Hamlin's picks. The Team Penske No. 2 Ford driver had the best points finish of that group before re-seeding, ending the regular season 15th. He also has recent success at a pair of playoff tracks, winning at Talladega Superspeedway in April to clinch his third postseason berth in four years, and prevailing at World Wide Technology Raceway last season.
Is Cindric entering the playoffs under the so-called radar? "I would love to be invisible for the first two rounds, because I know I'll make it to the Round of 8," he quipped.
Berry, driving for the Penske-affiliated Wood Brothers team, ended the regular season 21st in the Cup Series standings. He provided a highlight to his first season in the No. 21 Ford early on, winning at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the fifth race of the year to ensure his place on the playoff list.
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Since then, positive results have been a little harder to come by. Berry has not posted a top-five result since Vegas, though he stacked finishes of eighth at Richmond and ninth at Daytona to close out the regular season with some modest momentum.
"We're in a day and age right now, everybody's worried about consistency, right?" Berry said. "Everybody's worried about, they want to bring back the old point system, and they want to do this different. It's just the flavor of the week right now, I feel like. So it's easy to look at us and feel like we're not deserving, but ultimately, we won our race, won my first race that advanced us to the playoffs, and I feel like there's plenty of races along the way that we've been fast. And so yeah, I don't view us as a team that's an easy first-round exit. I feel like we can hold our own and we're ready to do it."
Several drivers and teams view the postseason as an opportunity to reset, but Dillon and his No. 3 Richard Childress Racing team elected to start that process sooner. Dillon said that after Dover Motor Speedway on July 20, the No. 3 group made a wholesale re-evaluation of its plan for the final five races of the regular season. That stretch yielded a convincing repeat win at Richmond Raceway, sealing one of the last available playoff berths.
Even with Dillon's net gain, he still ended the regular season 26th in points - lowest of the 16 playoff drivers before re-seeding. If that's reason to discount his playoff aims, Dillon says that's where he's found motivation.
"I always use it as fuel, but I feel like I have really a good confidence and a calm about it, like I don't have anything to prove in that sense," Dillon said. "I'm just really happy with where we're at as an organization because the first quarter of the season, I would have said differently. But now I feel confident, like I feel good that we can execute and make a good push and run."
That road starts this weekend at Darlington, a grueling, asymmetrical oval where van Gisbergen has competed twice before in the Cup Series and has a best finish of seventh in Xfinity competition. The chatter about writing him off, SVG says he's already tuned that out.
"Yeah, which is great. Doesn't worry us and puts no pressure on us, right?" van Gisbergen said. "So if we have a good week this week, it makes the next few harder, but if we have a tough week, it puts us in a hole, and it's gonna be hard to get out of it. So hopefully it'll be nice to prove people wrong, too."
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