Two drivers are set to enter the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series playoff with a series-high four wins this season. One of them, Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin, is sixth in total points scored, even after missing a race. The other, Trackhouse Racing's Shane van Gisbergen, is 25th.
It's no secret that NASCAR fans have generally had negative opinions of the modern "win and in" knockout playoff format, which was introduced in 2014.
But a lot of the playoff "hate" surrounding "bid stealers" generally comes from drivers who "get lucky" by winning a superspeedway race despite running 29th everywhere else.
Think Harrison Burton, who won at Daytona International Speedway to lock up a playoff berth and a top 16 championship finish, despite being 34th of 34 among full-time drivers in actual points scored. Sure, he earned his spot by doing what several others didn't: winning. But he was nowhere near among the series' top 16 performers in 2024.
Van Gisbergen, however, is far from that. Four wins in a row, and in dominant fashion, in road and street course races is not luck.
The problem is that NASCAR fans don't like that either.
By "that", we mean a driver from another racing series, coming in with very little NASCAR experience, and absolutely schooling the drivers who have been running Cup Series full-time for years, if not decades.
On the streets of Chicago in 2023, van Gisbergen, a three-time Australian V8 Supercars champion and 81-time winner in the series, became the first driver to win on Cup debut since Johnny Rutherford in 1963. Now in his first season as a full-time driver, his finishes on road and street course races include sixth, first, first, first, and first.
Comparing the skill level of drivers in different racing series is always a low-hanging fruit when it comes to stirring up trouble on social media or seeking clout within certain fanbases. It's inevitable every single year, in some way, shape, or form; we get it.
But that's just it. This time, it's not even a debate.
Van Gisbergen is lightyears ahead of literally everybody in NASCAR races which include right turns. And for the fans who get ticked off when the whole "they just turn left" line (which, yes, is still stupid) comes up, van Gisbergen schooling everybody, from series veterans to rising superstars, on tracks that actually do have right turns is just more salt in the wound.
This has been particularly true in 2025 because of something that actually has nothing to do with van Gisbergen: Larson's IndyCar effort.
It was honestly hilarious that fans thought low enough of IndyCar and the Indy 500, like they're some sort of a Double-A baseball league, to consider Larson the outright favorite to win the race in his first career series start last year.
Larson is Larson. That's cool, and we're not taking anything away from that. And I know it's over now, but if we could go back in time, I would urge you to please be realistic.
Now here we are in August 2025, and Larson has two career Indy 500 starts and three career IndyCar crashes, despite saying the car is "not hard to drive".
And instead, van Gisbergen is doing in NASCAR what fans thought Larson was going to do in IndyCar: beat the regulars at their own game, and in convincing fashion.
And they can't stand it.
I don't mean to criticize Larson here; it's not even him. He didn't say "I'm the best in the world" or even "I'm better than Max Verstappen". The media twisted his "all-around driver" remarks to stir up clicks and generate engagement, and while that is actually pretty standard, context matters.
And while Verstappen is probably still the best in the world, Larson should not have been vilified nearly as much as he was, specifically by the F1 fanbase, for a relatively harmless remark about the diversity of his racing background.
But still, the whole saga only added fuel to the whole Larson-to-IndyCar narrative, and when that backfired, even more so due to Larson's ensuing Brickyard 400 NASCAR success, that just made van Gisbergen's crossover success hurt that much more for NASCAR fans convinced that their favorite series is the one that requires the greatest skill level and the most diverse skillset.
Fans were even upset when IndyCar announcer Townsend Bell implied that IndyCar's Scott McLaughlin would have van Gisbergen-like success in NASCAR, given his own accomplishments in Supercars.
The 56-time race winner, like van Gisbergen, is a three-time Supercars champion, and McLaughlin even has the benefit of oval success, having not only won last year's unofficial IndyCar oval title but clinched it with a race to go.
They were upset about it because they know Bell is right, having watched van Gisbergen make a habit of turning Cup Series road races into Sunday afternoon drives in no man's land while riding around on cruise control.
They were upset about it because of the fact that Larson gave McLaughlin a sarcastic "thumbs up" after his Indy 500 pace lap crash, only to completely bottle a restart with an amateur move before the race's halfway point, adding to yet another day to forget.
It's not like van Gisbergen is going to win the NASCAR Cup Series championship. He certainly is not the best "all-around" driver in the series, probably not even at his own team.
But his historic success at basically every track that isn't an oval might well be an even bigger statement, and lest we forget, he's still a rookie.