If there was anybody who was going to be hurt by NASCAR's schedule changes for the 2026 Cup Series season, it was Trackhouse Racing's Shane van Gisbergen.
Van Gisbergen won five consecutive road and street course races in 2025, but three of those venues are no longer on the schedule.
Two of them, Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez and the Chicago Street Course, were featured in the regular season, while the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval was featured in the playoffs.
SVG proving doubters wrong, early and often
The new Coronado Street Course was added to the regular season as the replacement for the Mexican road course, but given the fact that van Gisbergen only placed 25th in the regular season standings a year ago with four victories, it seemed like it would be next to impossible for him to qualify for this year's playoffs.
Even under the new scoring format, which awards 15 bonus points (boosted from 40 to 55) for victories, van Gisbergen would have only qualified for the 2025 postseason by two points, and he was one of the "poster children" for why the removal of the "win and in" playoff format was a benefit for the sport as a whole.
Yet through seven races, van Gisbergen still finds himself inside the provisional playoff picture, despite the fact that only one road course race has been contested.
And that race took place at Circuit of the Americas (COTA), which is the one non-oval venue where he actually did not win a year ago.
SVG finds himself 14th in the point standings, 16 points above the playoff cut line, after scoring points in both stages of the Cook Out 400 at Martinsville Speedway two Sundays ago, en route to an 11th place finish. It was his third finish of 14th or better in the past four oval races.
Is he probably going to need to improve his best career oval finish (excluding superspeedways) of 10th place before the regular season ends to have a shot at qualifying for the playoffs? Absolutely. But he has now proven that he can keep pace at a variety of oval tracks, which is something that not many would have expected after his rookie season.