'Awesome' season capped with NASCAR Rookie of the Year honors for van Gisbergen

A season that Shane van Gisbergen described as “awesome” was capped off Tuesday during the season-ending awards celebration when he officially accepted Rookie of the Year honors in the NASCAR Cup Series.

“I’ve really enjoyed it and the wins have been great,” van Gisbergen said. “That is more than we probably ever hoped for, but getting competitive on the ovals has been a plus, and I feel like we’ll have some good momentum going into next year. Our team isn’t changing much on the [No.] 88 car, so it’s pretty cool.”

The New Zealander burst onto the NASCAR scene with a victory in Chicago in his 2023 debut. He spent the 2024 season running a full slate of Xfinity Series races while continuing to dip his toe in the Cup Series. But a full season in the Cup Series this year felt like starting over.

There is little crossover between the Xfinity Series cars and the seventh-generation Cup Series car. And they continue to evolve from year to year, even feeling different than what van Gisbergen drove last year. He admitted he felt like his experience was pretty low as the year began.

“And everyone is just so good in the Cup Series,” he said. “I knew it would be difficult, but it was really, really tough to start. It wasn't a shock, but we had to knuckle down pretty hard.”

Van Gisbergen won five races, three stages, and led 312 laps in his rookie season. The victories qualified him for the postseason, and he ultimately finished 12th in the standings. In all, van Gisbergen completed 92.9 percent of the laps run.

According to van Gisbergen, there were multiple things that stood out over the course of the season. 

For starters, his time in NASCAR has surprised him because he wasn’t sure that he would enjoy doing one thing every single weekend. NASCAR runs races from February into November, and the Cup Series schedule had only one weekend off. Usually, van Gisbergen would be racing in different series and trying different racing disciplines during the year.

“I wasn’t sure how I’d find it, and I’ve really liked it,” van Gisbergen said of the NASCAR schedule. “I like the challenges. I like how the tracks vary throughout the year – you’re not doing the same thing all the time. I’ve really enjoyed myself here.”

The second thing that stood out for van Gisbergen is the type of racing that he ended up enjoying. 

“I like the mile-and-a-half tracks, the intermediate stuff,” he said. “I didn’t really like it like that much in the Xfinity Series last year, and this year it’s where I felt like I made the bigger gains in the second half of the year. So, that type of racing where you can move around and the high speed that we’re doing, those tracks are pretty cool.”

Van Gisbergen showed steady improvement on the ovals from the start of the season to the finish. In the season’s first 15 races (through Michigan), there were 14 oval races. His average finish in those 14 races was 26.6, including four top-20 finishes.

In the 21 races to end the season (post-Michigan onward), there were 16 oval races. His average finish in those races was 23.2, with six top-20 finishes. That stretch also includes van Gisbergen earning a career-best (on an oval) 10th place at Kansas Speedway.

“I’d love to start again, you know, because I feel like I’ve learned so much,” van Gisbergen said of his growth. “But I guess I get that chance in 15 weeks or whatever it is. I feel like I started at a pretty low level, a deer in headlights to start the year, and it’s a lot better now.”

Van Gisbergen has no expectations or sets goals for his sophomore season in 2026.

“But we have to keep building, and I feel like we’ll have a much, much better base to start from, and as I said, a lot of team continuity,” he said. “So, that’ll really help.”