Kiwi Wine: SVG Wins Sonoma

Shane Van Gisbergen celebrates on his way to Victory Lane after winning the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway. (Photo: Sonoma Raceway)

Toyota/Save Mart 350: Shane Van Gisbergen dominated Sunday afternoon on the way to his third win of 2025 by taking the checkered flag in the 2025 rendition of the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway. SVG has now won back to back races for the first time in his Cup Series career, three of the last five races in 2025, and has become the driver to reach four career wins the quickest (although he'll admit himself it doesn't compare since the closest on that list also won on ovals). Either way, SVG and the 88 car out of Trackhouse Racing have been impressive as of late and have surpassed even this writer's expectations for 2025.

At first glance, there isn't much to say about Sunday's road course adventure in the Wine Country of Northern California. SVG led 97 of 110 laps, flipped both stages and finished no worse than 2nd in a stage (Stage 1), and even when he was taking it easy he was maintaining roughly a .5 second lead over second place. And then he'd turn the wicker up and drive away from everyone giving the field no shot at chasing him down to even try to battle for the win. A spate of late race cautions did bunch the field back up and give his closest contender of the day, Chase Briscoe, a chance at besting him on the restart. It also allowed a number of drivers further back try a different pit strategy than the Red Bull Chevy, but to no avail no matter how hard Chase Elliott and Michael McDowell tried to charge through the field. At the end of the day, SVG was the class of the field once again on the road courses - coming as no shock to anyone at this point.

We did have a few spats of good ole beatin' and bangin' on the road course that could have added to the drama of the day (and did add to the drama for some drivers) but as far as the overall race went, SVG was just too dominant. But to the individual battles we had Ty Gibbs going after 2/3 of RFK Racing with some fender smashing with Buescher and pit road fiasco with the 6 car. Turned out not to be much, but the 6 car bunch was still (IMO rightfully) pissed at the 54 driver. Josh Berry sent Erik Jones around (likely payback from Chicago) and shipped Carson Hocevar (not sure why but it looked hilarious). Ty Dillon shoved Alex Bowman through turn 11 on the last lap to advance in the In Season Challenge. Buescher slipped up and sent Blaney off the track. An angry Blaney did calm down and never really had a shot at retribution anyway, and eventually got ruined by a spinning Kyle Larson late in the race. Larson sent Gragson around but Gragson was too far back initially and then got too damaged later to chase Larson down before Larson was wrecked out of the race. Again, not much came out of the battles and cars spent spinning, but it did give us a few tense late race restarts and prevented SVG from winning by 6+ seconds.

Next up we head to Dover Motor Speedway with Xfinity Series and Cup Series action as the Craftsman Truck Series enjoys another weekend off before returning the next weekend at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park. The Xfinity Series will kick off the weekend Saturday afternoon at 4:30 p.m. on The CW with the BetRivers 200. The Cup Series takes center stage on Sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. on TNT with the Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 400. Be sure to tune in to what I hope is great racing from The Monster Mile!

Dover Picks:

Trucks = OFF

Xfinity = Carson Kvapil

Cup = Denny Hamlin