One of the big surprises from the first four races of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season was the fact that Trackhouse Racing's Shane van Gisbergen found himself fifth in the point standings, even with only one of those four races being a road course race.
In addition to his runner-up finish at Circuit of the Americas (COTA), which was the only road course on the 2025 schedule where SVG did not find victory lane, he finished sixth at EchoPark Speedway (Atlanta Motor Speedway), marking his best ever oval result, and 11th at Phoenix Raceway, despite having to overcome multiple incidents.
At Las Vegas Motor Speedway, however, the driver of the No. 97 Chevrolet came back down to earth.
After entering the 267-lap Pennzoil 400 around the four-turn, 1.5-mile (2.414-kilometer) Las Vegas, Nevada oval 18 points above the playoff cut line, van Gisbergen now finds himself as the 16th and final driver in the provisional playoff field.
Van Gisbergen finished Sunday's race in 36th (last) place, and he dropped from fifth in points into a 16th place tie with Spire Motorsports' Daniel Suarez and Kaulig Racing's A.J. Allmendinger. SVG owns the tiebreaker as a result of the fact that his runner-up finish at COTA is the best finish posted by any of those three drivers so far this year.
It was the worst possible outcome of the afternoon for van Gisbergen, who scored just one point with that result after failing to score any stage points.
It's also what we've unfortunately been expecting to happen at some point.
Even with four regular season victories in 2025, van Gisbergen only finished in 25th place in the regular season point standings. However, he actually would have made the playoffs under the new "Chase" format, even without "win and in", since the 15 bonus points now awarded for wins would have given him 60 extra points and vaulted him up to 16th in the standings.
The problem is that two of the venues where SVG won during the regular season a year ago are no longer on this year's schedule, meaning that he needs to drastically improve upon his average oval performance to have a chance to get back to the postseason in 2026.
A new career-best oval finish of sixth at Atlanta was a good start, but it's hard to read much into a superspeedway result, one way or another. The 11th place effort at Phoenix was also a positive sign, but positive signs can only go so far when they're offset by last place finishes one week later.
Van Gisbergen has just one career top 10 finish on a traditional oval, with that being a 10th place finish at Kansas Speedway in October. He definitely improved his oval performance down the stretch in 2025, but that improvement was more in terms of scoring consistent top 20 finishes, rather than regularly finishing outside of the top 25.
When it comes to qualifying for the playoffs, that simply isn't going to cut it.
There are no two ways about it; with just two road course races and one new street course race remaining on this year's schedule, van Gisbergen is going to need to make massive gains on ovals to have a chance of getting back to the playoffs – and that's even if he wins all three of those non-oval events.
And believe it or not, he might well be Trackhouse Racing's best shot at a postseason berth. Ross Chastain has had a rough start to the season, and rookie Connor Zilisch is last in points among the 35 drivers who have run every race, illustrating that, while he does have immense upside, patience is very much needed with the 19-year-old, and the "next Jeff Gordon" label was indeed far too premature.
Darlington Raceway, a track where SVG placed 20th and 32nd a year ago, is scheduled to host the Goodyear 400 this Sunday, March 22, with live coverage set to be provided by Fox Sports 1 beginning at 3:30 p.m. ET. Start a free trial of FuboTV now and don't miss it!