From clinching three Supercar championships to winning three NASCAR Xfinity races this year, Shane van Gisbergen has come a long way. He also sent off ripples of excitement in the racing community when he landed a debut NASCAR victory in 2023. One would have thought that all this would have been enough to get the driver quickly accustomed to NASCAR, but what if we tell you that’s not the case? Some aspects of NASCAR still baffle him and that includes the disparity in cars.

So SVG’s transition to a full-time Xfinity car was not smooth this year. In October, in an unreleased interview at Talladega Superspeedway conducted by Matt Weaver, Shane van Gisbergen confessed his wobbly feelings about Xfinity cars. Weaver posted SVG’s thoughts on X: “I like the Cup car because it feels like every other car in the world I’ve driven and then I got in the Xfinity car and had no idea what was happening. It drives like a forklift, the way the rear end moves, how it drives but if you speak to drivers here, they like it better.”

Well, you do require time to assimilate another sport’s racing techniques, especially if the cars are different. The Next-Gen car is universal with 18-inch wheels with large single-lug nuts, an independent rear suspension, and a five-speed sequential transmission. On the other hand, Xfinity cars are old-school NASCAR: 15-inch wheels with five lug nuts each, a solid rear axle, and a four-speed manual transmission.

But hey, the driver said something similar back in June. He was four months in as a full-time driver in the Xfinity Series when he said, “Sometimes it feels like you’re driving a forklift.”

Despite this difficulty in maneuvering the Xfinity car, we are all aware of Shane van Gisbergen’s thumping success. He won three races this year, all of them road courses—Portland, Sonoma, and Chicago. Although he could not make it to the championship round, the New Zealand racer topped off the season with an amazing 16.49-average finish in Xfinity.

His excellence has drawn praise from top NASCAR drivers like Kyle Larson, who felt lucky to race against him in Chicago. “I wanted to learn more than anything, and I wanted to get to battle with him because he’s just really good at creating shapes and angles and passing.”

Shane van Gisbergen’s success was beset with the ‘forklift’ challenge. And a Cup Series driver agrees with his view about the cars.

What did Tyler Reddick have to say?

This year was 23XI Racing’s breakthrough year. Tyler Reddick clinched the regular season championship and narrowly scraped the Cup Series title after collecting three wins. His milestone was conquering superspeedways and ovals this year, as Reddick is usually strong on road courses. He is quite like Shane van Gisbergen. So the 23XI driver concurred with the Kiwi speedster about how the Next-Gen car handles better, especially on road courses. It is more durable as compared to the previous Cup car.

Reddick detailed his opinion about the Gen 6 car in June this year. “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. 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.”

Then he harped on the Next-Gen’s versatile nature. “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.”

But what was SVG’s opinion? Well, he had stated, “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.”

Evidently, road course winners harbor the same view about NASCAR’s differing vehicles. With Shane van Gisbergen’s comfort with the Next-Gen, Cup Series drivers have another reason to worry about in 2025!