The Red Bull driver with more 2025 wins than Max Verstappen
Red Bull driver Shane van Gisbergen has netted three NASCAR Cup Series wins during his rookie season.
For the past four years, Red Bull Racing driver Max Verstappen has seemed inevitable in the world of Formula 1 — but as the team struggles in 2025, a new Red Bull-sponsored driver has stepped into the ring: Shane van Gisbergen.
This year represents van Gisbergen’s first full-time season in the NASCAR Cup Series over in the United States, and he’s stunned the field by snagging three wins in the past five weeks.
Shane van Gisbergen becomes Red Bull’s latest dominant winner
Hailing from Auckland, New Zealand, Shane van Gisbergen has joined the list of NASCAR’s winningest drivers in the 2025 Cup Series season by snagging his third victory in five weeks.
The three-time Australian Supercars champion got his first taste of NASCAR back in 2023, when he made a one-off debut at the Chicago street circuit — the first street course in the sport’s history. Van Gisbergen dominated, leaving the stock car field in awe of a talent that they’d yet to master.
The following year, he made the move to the United States to contest a full season of NASCAR Xfinity Series races, along with a handful of Cup events, all with his Red Bull athlete sponsorship. In 2025, he made the leap to Cup to compete full-time in the No. 88 Trackhouse Racing machine.
Though he’s still struggled to find his footing on ovals, van Gisbergen has nevertheless become Red Bull’s most dominant driver of the summer thanks to Cup’s recent road course sweep.
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From victory at the Cup Series’ Mexico City debut — which van Gisbergen won with a little advice from none other than Max Verstappen — to absolute dominance at Chicago’s street circuit to last weekend’s stunning show at Sonoma Raceway, the Kiwi driver is clearly on a roll.
It’s a stark contrast to Verstappen’s 2025 season. After several years of dominance, the reigning F1 champion has only managed to net two victories on the year: One in Japan, and one in Imola. The immensely challenging RB21 has left the Dutch driver on the back foot, trying to claw back an ever-growing gap between himself and McLaren drivers Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris in the championship standings.
Yet just as Verstappen’s title bids often came with controversy — from the 2021 title decider to Red Bull’s cost cap breaches — so too has van Gisbergen’s dominance been roundly criticized by a segment of fans and pundits in the NASCAR space.
The Cup Series is traditionally an oval-centered sport with one or two road courses to flesh out the schedule, but the 2025 season sees the 36-race schedule fleshed out with six road or street courses: Circuit of The Americas, Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, Chicago street circuit, Sonoma Raceway, Watkins Glen, and Charlotte Motor Speedway’s infield ROVAL.
To determine its championship, NASCAR utilizes a playoff-style format. Sixteen drivers will qualify for the title, and every few races, four drivers will be eliminated until four remain to battle for the title at the season finale in Phoenix. To qualify for the playoffs, all a driver needs to do is win a race — and van Gisbergen has won three, putting him on equal ground with Christopher Bell, Denny Hamlin, and Kyle Larson.
But many naysayers are currently arguing that van Gisbergen’s wins are somehow different; if he can “only” win on road courses, then he shouldn’t be able to qualify for the title of what is an oval-heavy championship.
That said, van Gisbergen has been able to do the one thing many drivers have struggled with this year: Win. And with only one road course during the playoffs, the Kiwi driver will nevertheless have an uphill — and decidedly oval-shaped — battle ahead of him.
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