Wilkesboro belonged to NASCAR champ Joey Logano. But there was another winner, too

If you tuned in for the last 10 laps of the battle of attrition that was North Wilkesboro Speedway on Sunday, you might imagine that this race had one winner.

Read more Wilkesboro belonged to NASCAR champ Joey Logano. But there was another winner, too

And, in a literal sense, it did.

But there were actually two winners on Sunday evening.

One was Joey Logano, the race winner, the ever-smiling-but-ever-attacking three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion.

The other?

Shane van Gisbergen.

To be clear, the spectacle that was NASCAR’s first Cup points race at North Wilkesboro Speedway in 30 years belonged to Logano. The driver of the 22 car led a career-high 323 laps Sunday. That was even more laps led than the last time he won at North Wilkesboro Speedway — in 2024, when he led 199 of 200 laps at the annual All-Star Race. His competitors marveled at his speed post-race. He passed so much lapped traffic that there were only six cars on the lead lap once all was said and done Sunday — only six in the 30-plus car field.

And he needed this result, too. Coming into Sunday’s race, he sat 18th in the NASCAR Cup Series standings — two spots below the 10-race playoff Chase with the regular season running out. He hadn’t won all season; he hadn’t even earned a stage win before Sunday. Once all the carnage cleared, he added 73 points and jumped up to 15th — and, more importantly, he felt a belief return to the 22 team.

But while fireworks exploded in the muggy North Carolina sky, with Logano completing a Polish lap around the vaunted venue, watching his season starting to ascend in the right kind of smoke — there was another winner not far away. He was smiling, pouring water over his face to cool down after one of the warmest runs of the season, sitting down behind his car on pit lane, staring into the cloudless sky in exhaustion but maybe also wonder.

Van Gisbergen finished fifth on Sunday — only his second Top 5 finish on a Cup Series oval in his already storied career. His first Top 5 came at Nashville last month; he ran sixth at Atlanta last weekend.

Yes, van Gisbergen has won eight Cup races in his brief but remarkable NASCAR Cup career — including winning in his first career start, in NASCAR’s first street course race in Chicago in 2023, an ineffable feat. The New Zealander has even won twice already in 2026. But those wins have all come on road courses, a skill everyone knew he had coming from his reign in the Australian Supercars Championship.

But the rest of the Cup Series beware: He’s getting better on ovals. And quickly.

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So quickly, in fact, that he’s even surprising himself a bit. When he took the lead early in Sunday’s race — he led a race-second-best 49 laps — he joked over the radio: “I’m leading. What the (expletive) do I do now?!”

“Just like the Truck race, I could roll the bottom really well and be loose in on turns,” van Gisbergen said post-race. “We had one good stage where I could run up top. … (Short-track racing) is a lot like a road course. Half the race I right-foot braked. I just feel comfortable doing that. It’s a real balanced track. You can really affect the car with your driving technique, so I felt comfortable doing that.”

Why was he so good here?

There’s still room for him to grow. He admitted that his game on the intermediate ovals needs improvement, and if he wants to keep his place in the 16-car playoff, he’ll need to improve there. He sits 14th after North Wilkesboro.

But there’s no doubt that he won Sunday. Not quite to the same extent as Logano — the real victor, the one who drove his car to the lift and ascended into Victory Lane on top of the media center roof, the one who lifted a steering wheel as confetti and water splashed around him. But he won.

Denny Hamlin, who finished second, expressed as much. He spoke of van Gisbergen in a way that, if you weren’t paying attention, you probably thought he was talking about Logano.

“I just can’t say how impressive it is,” Hamlin said, talking about one of the two winners of Sunday — the one who didn’t take the trip to Victory Lane. “(It’s crazy) that the guy, in a year and a half, or whatever it is, has come in here and figured out how to run ovals as good as he has.”

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