Kevin Harvick weighs in on Shane van Gisbergen performance at The Clash, what it means

Coming off the weekend at Bowman Gray, Shane Van Gisbergen will feel pretty good about his performance, though there’s always room for some improvement.

At the very least, he has now established that he’s perfectly comfortable on a quarter-mile flat track.

“He had a good qualifying run, had a good heat race. Put himself in a good position to be competitive all night and ran a good race,” Kevin Harvick said on the Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast. “I think as we go to some of these other styles of racetrack I think that there will be some learning curve there, but it seems like the Martinsville, Bowman Gray style racetracks are not going to be that issue for SVG.”

Now going up to the Cup Series full time, expectations are high for Van Gisbergen. Stemming from a win at Chicago two years ago in the Cup Series, Van Gisbergen has been pointed to as a real up-and-comer.

These Bowman Gray type of tracks? No problem.

“For me, the Martinsville race last year in the Kaulig car was probably his shining moment in the Cup car,” Harvick said. “And from the outside looking in you’re like, OK, we’re going to go to Bowman Gray and we’re probably going to see him perform well because of what he did at Martinsville. And you heard a lot of the guys talk about how it reminded them more of Martinsville in how you roll the corner and the things that you did with the car, just a shorter track but a lot of the same technique. And that proved to be right.”

Van Gisbergen actually didn’t move around a ton in the main event at Bowman Gray. He started 10th and finished P9.

But on a day that required some intricate driving, that was a great start.

“The interesting part, and we talk about this on this show sometimes, is he’s not used to banging into people,” Harvick explained. “He did a very good job at how hard he hit people when he was aggressive, when he shoved somebody out of the way. And there’s still other guys that don’t do that, right? They just kind of hack it up and knock people out of the way or chop them off or run them into the fence. There’s a line to everything, and being able to protect yourself and be aggressive is a fine art.”

Don’t be surprised if Van Gisbergen learns that art quite quickly. He seems to pick up everything else on the race track in a hurry.