Van Gisbergen learning NASCAR ropes by ‘driving a forklift’
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Alanis King, Racing columnist
Last summer, three-time Australian Supercars champion Shane van Gisbergen shocked the NASCAR world by winning his debut in the top-level Cup Series. It was the first time anyone had done so in 60 years, and it kicked off his whirlwind of a career change: moving to the United States to pursue NASCAR full time.
This summer, he’s four months into his tour as a full-time driver in the second-tier Xfinity Series, where he’s preparing for his eventual move to Cup. What has he learned about the car so far?
“Sometimes it feels like you’re driving a forklift,” he told ESPN.
Van Gisbergen’s NASCAR switch is fascinating for many reasons, including the car. His debut NASCAR victory came on the Chicago Street Course, which he ran with Trackhouse Racing’s “Project91” team, a part-time star car for drivers from other series. It was the perfect storm: It was NASCAR’s first time at a street course, and it happened in the rain — two things that come naturally for Van Gisbergen. That helped level the playing field between him and the drivers who race NASCAR every week.
The Chicago race was meant to be a one-off, and Van Gisbergen told ESPN that he didn’t expect to win, but “stuff just snowballed so quickly” after he did. He soon signed a development contract with Trackhouse, which included running the 2024 season with Kaulig Racing in Xfinity to adapt to NASCAR’s oval-heavy schedule.
“I had the perfect opportunity to come in and be on a reasonably equal playing field at Chicago, since street circuits are sort of my deal,” Van Gisbergen said. “America’s a massive place, and there are so many young, talented drivers coming through. It’s hard for people to come over here and break into it, so I’m pretty lucky.”
Perhaps the biggest factor in Van Gisbergen’s win was the new Cup Series race car, called the “Next Gen,” which debuted in 2022. It’s less like old NASCAR cars (built to go fast and turn left) and more like a sports car (built to go fast, plus turn left and right), making it easier for non-NASCAR drivers to be competitive.
That adaptability hasn’t trickled down to NASCAR’s top development leagues. So while Van Gisbergen adjusts to the NASCAR schedule in Xfinity, he’s doing so in a totally unfamiliar car — and he’s already won in it twice.
“[I’ve learned] a huge amount of things, like just how funky the Xfinity car is to drive,” he said. “The biggest thing is that the Cup car, it feels like a race car. It feels like every other car I’ve driven around the world, with the aero and the rear end. It’s a huge evolution of a NASCAR, I guess, to go the whole different route that they have. Even on the oval, it kind of feels like a normal car.
“Whereas the Xfinity car, it’s only specific to oval racing, basically. The style of car that has been designed and developed for years, that NASCAR type of stock car. The rear end is really, really interesting, how it moves around. I’ve never driven a car like that.”
Since the arrival of the Next Gen, the NASCAR Xfinity and Cup cars are fundamentally different vehicles. The Xfinity car is old-school NASCAR: 15-inch wheels with five lug nuts each, a solid rear axle, and a four-speed manual transmission. The Next Gen car is in line with the rest of the world: 18-inch wheels with large single lug nuts, an independent rear suspension and a five-speed sequential transmission.
Those changes manifest themselves in many ways. When talking about the old Cup car versus the new one last year, 23XI Racing Cup Series driver Tyler Reddick told me the new car is especially durable on road courses.
“Where a lot of drivers would have issues under braking with the [last] car was with the old-school truck arms, and just how much those flex and wheel hop,” Reddick said. “Once you had axle hop — wheel hop — you were more than likely crashing. The more you had that axle hop, if you didn’t crash the car, you would just shake all the parts loose. You had to really go into the approach of: ‘If I’m going to push this car, I’m going to save it for the end of the race, because I don’t want to just rip the car apart.’
“With the Next Gen car, that’s totally different. With independent rear suspension, all the beefy suspension parts it has, you don’t really have situations where the car falls apart like the other car did. You can launch it across curbs as hard as you want.”
Van Gisbergen’s first Xfinity win came at Portland International Raceway earlier this month. On the first lap, the wheel hop got him.
“I got into Sam Mayer,” he said. “The rear end just starts locking up and doing whatever it does. It’s certainly an interesting thing. I haven’t really felt that in many cars, so it’s weird, to say the least.”
But the car is only one challenge in Van Gisbergen’s NASCAR switch. Another is the tracks; he comes from a background of sports cars, endurance racing, rally and more, but much of the NASCAR season happens on ovals.
So far, both of Van Gisbergen’s Xfinity wins are on road courses. He has an average finish of 15.7 so far this season, and on ovals, his best result so far is third in Atlanta.
“The ovals are very, very, very difficult,” Van Gisbergen said. “But I feel like I’m getting better and better, finishing the races with straight cars and starting to get more and more competitive. Road courses are [my] strength, but I don’t know if ovals are a weakness. We’re obviously not running at the very front, but getting better and better and learning a lot. So it’s kind of about where we expect it to be.”
One of the main voices in Van Gisbergen’s decision to come Stateside was Marcos Ambrose, who moved to NASCAR as a Supercars champion nearly 20 years ago. He was always a standout on road courses in the Cup Series, even with the old car, but ovals didn’t come as easily.
Right now, Van Gisbergen thinks he just needs time to adapt.
“I’ve had some great people helping me, with Kevin Harvick and Marcos Ambrose, and then my teammates A.J. [Allmendinger] and Josh [Williams] as well,” he said. “They’re always open to anything I ever ask.
“A.J.’s a good yardstick. He’s obviously capable of winning on the ovals, and we’re in the same equipment. If I can be matching him or running near what he’s doing in the races, that can only be a good thing. I’m trying to learn what he’s doing with the car to make it faster to try and match him.”
Van Gisbergen’s NASCAR switch is compelling on a number of levels. He’s 35 years old, around the age when longtime NASCAR drivers near their performance peak, and he had a career for the history books overseas. If he’d continued that career, he would’ve been a threat to win Supercars championships for years to come.
Instead, he’s giving himself a new challenge in America. He told ESPN that his Chicago performance probably makes NASCAR more appealing for other drivers, but that once they get here, “it’s certainly not easy.”
“Everyone here is very, very good,” Van Gisbergen said. “They’ve been doing these tracks for so long, and driving these cars every week. It’s been a huge change and challenge in life, moving here and the career. It’s been a lot of new skills to learn. But most of all, it’s been a lot of fun.”
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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
The committee has released its second crack at the top 25, and it’s (almost) all Big Ten at the top.
That might seem a bit strange to the conference that boasts the most playoff-caliber teams and the most nonconference wins against other Power 4 leagues, and also has Paul Finebaum there to remind everyone just how angry they should be at this affront to good judgment.
With that, we’ll handle much of Finebaum’s homework for him. Here’s this week’s Anger Index.
1. The SEC
Eleven weeks into the 2024 season, and one thing seems abundantly clear: The SEC is the best conference in college football. Take a look at Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings, for example, where nine of the top 17 teams are from the SEC. Or use ESPN’s FPI metric, where the SEC has spots 1, 2, 4, 5 and 9. Consider that the team currently ninth in the SEC standings, South Carolina, has three wins over SP+ top-40 teams and losses to the committee’s No. 10 and 22 teams by a combined total of five points.
Yes, the SEC’s dominance and depth seem obvious.
So, of course, four of the top five teams in the committee’s rankings this week are from the SEC.
Wait, no, sorry about that. We’re getting late word here that, in fact, it’s the Big Ten with teams No. 1, 2, 4 and 5 in this week’s rankings.
It’s not that those four Big Ten teams aren’t any good. Oregon (No. 1) has chewed up and spit out nearly all comers this season. Ohio State (No. 2) is the best squad the gross domestic product of Estonia can buy. Penn State (No. 4), well, the Nittany Lions still haven’t beaten Ohio State, but we assume the rest of the résumé is OK. Indiana (No. 5) is blowing the doors off people.
But that’s it. The rest of the Big Ten is a mess. You need a magnifying glass to find Michigan‘s QB production. Iowa finally learned how to score and somehow has gotten worse. Minnesota looked like the next-best team in the conference, and the Gophers have losses to North Carolina and Rutgers.
A lack of depth does not inherently mean the teams at the top are not elite. Indeed, the other teams in any conference remain independent variables when addressing the ceiling for any one team. If the Kansas City Chiefs joined the Sun Belt, Patrick Mahomes would still be a magician and Andy Reid would still be saying “Bundle-a-rooskie-doo” in your nightmares.
But the cold, hard facts are these: Indiana’s best win came last week against Michigan (No. 40 in SP+) by 3. Penn State’s best win (by SP+) came by 3 against a below-.500 USC team that just benched its QB. Ohio State is absolutely elite on paper, but on the field, the Buckeyes’ success is entirely buoyed by a 20-13 win at Penn State, a team we also know very little about.
The SEC gets flack for boasting of its greatness routinely, and to be sure, that narrative has often bolstered less-than-elite teams. But this year, every reasonable metric suggests the SEC’s production actually matches its ego, and when Ole Miss (No. 11), Georgia (No. 12), Alabama (No. 10) and Texas A&M (No. 15) — all with two losses — are dogged as a result of playing in a league where every other team warrants a spot in the top 25, it undermines the entire point of having a committee that can use its judgment rather than simply look at the standings.
Let’s compare two teams with blind résumés.
Team A: 8-1 record, No. 14 in ESPN’s strength of record. Best win came vs. SP+ No. 20, loss came to a top-10 team by 3. Has four wins vs. Power 4 teams with a winning record, by an average of 14 points.
Team B: 8-1 record, No. 11 in ESPN’s strength of record. Best win came vs. SP+ No. 28, loss came to a top-15 team by 15. Has one win vs. a Power 4 team with a winning record, by 3.
So, which team has the better résumé?
This shouldn’t take too long to figure out. Team A looks better by almost every metric, right?
Well, Team A is SMU, who checks in at No. 14 in this week’s ranking.
Team B, though? That’d be the Mustangs’ old friends from the Southwest Conference, the Texas Longhorns. Texas checks in at No. 3.
Perhaps you’ve watched enough of both Texas and SMU to think the eye test favors the Longhorns. That’s fair. But should the eye test account for 11 spots in the rankings? At some point, the results have to matter more.
Or, perhaps it’s the brand that matters to the committee. If that same résumé belonged to a school that hadn’t just bought its way into the Power 4 this year, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t be in the top 10 with ease.
Let’s dig into three different teams still hoping for a playoff bid, even if the odds are against them at this point.
Team A: 7-2, 1 win over SP+ top 40. No. 28 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 18 points.
Team B: 7-2, 1 win over SP+ top 40. No. 25 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 13 points.
Team C: 7-2, no wins over SP+ top 40. No. 24 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 21 points.
You could split hairs here, but the bottom line is none has a particularly compelling résumé, and they’re all pretty similar.
So, who are they?
Team B is Iowa State, which plummeted from the rankings after losing two straight. But the committee isn’t supposed to care when you lost your games. Losing in September is not better than losing in November. At least that’s what they say.
Team A is Arizona State. Its 10-point loss to Cincinnati came without starting QB Sam Leavitt and was due, at least in part, to a kicking game so traumatic head coach Kenny Dillingham held an open tryout afterward. The Sun Devils and Cyclones are two of three two-loss Power 4 teams unranked this week (alongside Pitt), but unlike Iowa State and Pitt, Arizona State isn’t coming off back-to-back losses. The Sun Devils’ absence seems entirely correlated to the fact that no one believed this team would be any good entering the season, and so few people have looked closely enough to change their minds that the committee feels comfortable ignoring them.
The team the committee can’t ignore, however, is Team C. That would be Colorado. Coach Prime has convinced the world the Buffaloes are for real, even if nothing on their résumé — a No. 77 strength of schedule, worse than 7-2 Western Kentucky‘s — suggests that’s anything close to a certainty.
The Big 12 remains wide open, but it’s to the committee’s detriment that it has so eagerly dismissed two of the better teams just because they’re not as fun to talk about.
Has Missouri played with fire this year? You betcha. Just last week, the Tigers were on the verge of falling to Oklahoma before the Sooners’ woeful QB situation reared its ugly head again and the game ended in a 30-23 Tigers win.
But here’s the thing about playing with fire: So long as you don’t turn your living room into an inferno, it’s actually pretty impressive.
Missouri is 7-2 with wins against SP+ Nos. 26 and 28, and its only losses are to the committee’s No. 10 and No. 15 teams. SP+ has Missouri at No. 17, though we can chalk that up to Connelly’s hometown bias. But No. 23? After a top-10 season in 2023, don’t the Tigers deserve a little benefit of the doubt? They currently trail three three-loss teams (Louisville, South Carolina and LSU) and are behind Boise State, Colorado, Washington State and Clemson, who, combined, have exactly one win over SP+ top-40 teams.
There’s a good chance that, should Brady Cook not return to the lineup, Missouri will get waxed at South Carolina on Saturday, and then the argument is moot. But the committee isn’t supposed to look ahead and take guesses at what it believes might happen (Florida State’s snub last year notwithstanding). It’s supposed to judge based on what’s on the books so far, and putting Missouri this far down the rankings seems more than a tad harsh.
The committee threw a nice bone to the non-Power 4 schools this week, with four teams ranked, including No. 25 Tulane Green Wave. That seems deserved, given Tulane’s recent run. But what is it, exactly, that puts the Green Wave ahead of UNLV?
UNLV has the No. 31 strength of record. Tulane is No. 32.
UNLV has the No. 98 strength of schedule played. Tulane is No. 96.
Tulane has a one-possession loss to a top-20 team. UNLV has a one-possession loss to a top-20 team.
The key difference between the two is UNLV has wins against two Power 4 opponents — Houston and Kansas. Houston, by the way, just knocked off Kansas State, a team that beat Tulane.
So perhaps the committee should spread a bit more love outside the Power 4.
Also Angry: Pittsburgh Panthers (7-2, unranked), Duke Blue Devils (7-3, unranked), Georgia Bulldogs (7-2, No. 12), Utah Utes AD Mark Harlan (the Utes would be ranked if Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark hadn’t rigged the system!) and UConn Huskies (7-3, unranked and thus prohibiting us from Jim Mora Jr. giving a “You wanna talk about playoffs?!?” rant).
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Mark Schlabach, ESPN Senior Writer
Oregon remained No. 1 in the second rankings released by the College Football Playoff selection committee on Tuesday night.
The Ducks, who cruised past Maryland 39-18 last week to improve to 10-0, were followed by No. 2 Ohio State, No. 3 Texas, No. 4 Penn State and No. 5 Indiana.
BYU, Tennessee, Notre Dame, Miami, Alabama, Ole Miss and Georgia round out the committee’s top 12.
Miami’s first loss of the season, 28-23 at Georgia Tech, and Georgia’s second defeat, 28-10 at Ole Miss, shook up the committee’s rankings. The Hurricanes fell five spots to No. 9, while the Bulldogs dropped nine spots to No. 12.
Using the current rankings, Oregon (Big Ten), Texas (SEC), BYU (Big 12) and Miami (ACC) would be the four highest-rated conference champions and would receive first-round byes in the 12-team playoff.
Boise State is No. 13 in the committee’s rankings, but the Broncos would be included in the 12-team playoff as the fifth-highest-rated conference champion from the Mountain West.
The first-round matchups would look like this: No. 12 Boise State at No. 5 Ohio State; No. 11 Ole Miss at No. 6 Penn State, No. 10 Alabama at No. 7 Indiana; and No. 9 Notre Dame at No. 8 Tennessee.
Although Georgia, which captured two of the past three CFP national championships, is ranked No. 12 in the committee’s rankings, the Bulldogs would be the first team left out of the 12-team playoff.
SMU is No. 14, followed by Texas A&M, Kansas State, Colorado, Washington State, Louisville and Clemson.
South Carolina, LSU, Missouri, Army and Tulane close out the top 25.
The updated College Football Playoff Top 25 rankings 🏆 pic.twitter.com/ymA9wlI1dB
— ESPN (@espn) November 13, 2024
The Gamecocks and Green Wave made their CFP rankings debuts this season, replacing Iowa State and Pittsburgh, who were Nos. 17 and 18 last week, respectively.
There were nine SEC teams included in the committee’s rankings, four each from the ACC and Big Ten and three from the Big 12.
Georgia, which also fell 41-34 at Alabama on Sept. 28, plays what might be a CFP elimination game against Tennessee at Sanford Stadium on Saturday (7:30 p.m. ET/ABC, ESPN+). Georgia is 14-3 after a loss under coach Kirby Smart, bouncing back after each of its previous eight defeats. The Bulldogs haven’t lost back-to-back games in the regular season since 2016, Smart’s first season coaching his alma mater.
Georgia has defeated Tennessee in seven of its past eight contests, including a 38-10 win on the road last season.
Asked about the CFP implications of the game on Monday, Smart said his team had to solely focus on beating the Volunteers.
“I don’t ever take those approaches,” Smart said. “I don’t think they’re the right way to go about things. I think you’re trying to win your conference all the time, and to do that you’ve got to win your games at home. You’ve got to play well on the road, which we have and haven’t. We’ve done both, but I like making it about who we play and how we play, and less about just outcomes.”
BYU survived a 22-21 scare at Utah last week. With Miami’s loss, the Cougars jumped the Hurricane as the third-highest-rated conference champion. BYU hosts Kansas on Saturday, followed by a road game at Arizona State on Nov. 23 and home game against Houston the next week. According to ESPN Analytics, BYU is the heavy favorite (92%) to earn a spot in the Big 12 title game and also win it (40%).
Army would be the next-highest-rated conference champion behind Boise State, one spot ahead of fellow AAC program Tulane. The Black Knights improved to 9-0 with last week’s 14-3 victory at North Texas. They’ll have their best chance to make a statement to the selection committee in their next game, against Notre Dame at Yankee Stadium in New York on Nov. 23.
The four first-round games will be played at the home campus of the higher-seeded teams on Dec. 20 and 21. The four quarterfinal games will be staged at the VRBO Fiesta Bowl, Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, Rose Bowl presented by Prudential and Allstate Sugar Bowl on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
The two semifinal games will take place at the Capital One Orange Bowl and Goodyear Cotton Bowl on Jan. 9 and 10.
The CFP National Championship presented by AT&T is scheduled for Jan. 20 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
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