Shane van Gisbergen wins NASCAR race at Sonoma, holding off Chase Briscoe

A week after crashing out at Naval Base Coronado, Shane van Gisbergen reclaimed his crown as NASCAR’s current king of road courses.The 37-year-old from New Zealand held off a pair of Toyotas from Joe Gibbs Racing – Chase Briscoe and Ty Gibbs – to win at Sonoma Raceway for the second consecutive year, taking the checkered flag on Sunday in the Toyota/Save Mart 350.The victory was the eighth of van Gisbergen’s Cup Series career, tying him for second all-time in road course wins with Tony Stewart.

Van Gisbergen trails record-holder Jeff Gordon by just one road course victory now, but he’ll have to wait until next season to match the NASCAR Hall of Famer as Sonoma was the final road course race of the season.Van Gisbergen swept the weekend at Sonoma, also winning the second-tier O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race on Saturday. He is now tied with AJ Allmendinger for the most combined road course wins across NASCAR’s top three national touring series at 14.

This is the second consecutive year that van Gisbergen has won at Sonoma, making him one of nine drivers in the history of NASCAR's Cup Series to win multiple races at the road course circuit in the rolling hills of California's wine country.“What a day. Pretty special to make up for last week too.

I was certainly pissed at the start of the week, but this makes up for it,” van Gisbergen told TNT Sports after the victory. “Chase was just really, really good. A couple more laps and we would’ve had some problems.”

With 27 laps to go, van Gisbergen took his final pit stop of the day — taking four fresh tires and fuel — and Gibbs was given the green light by his team to “hustle, no mistakes.” The 23-year-old Gibbs had won the first two stages of the race, but had fallen behind the leaders. Two laps later, he was up to second place behind Kyle Larson.

After taking the lead, Gibbs pitted with 23 laps to go, and van Gisbergen jumped back to the front.Gibbs charged back up to third place but couldn’t close the gap as Briscoe and van