Van Gisbergen, McDowell Lead Chevrolet to Second-Straight Front-Row Sweep |
| TEAM CHEVY UNOFFICIAL TOP-10 STARTING LINEUP: 1st – Shane van Gisbergen2nd – Michael McDowell4th – Ross Chastain5th – Connor Zilisch | MEDIA RESOURCES: Photo Gallery | Race AdvancesChevrolet Newsroom |
· For the first time this season and the fifth time in his NASCAR Cup Series career, Shane van Gisbergen will lead the NASCAR Cup Series to the green flag from to the pole position. Laying down a best-lap of 71.165 seconds around the upstate New York circuit, the road course ringer led Chevrolet to its third pole win of the 2026 season. The trio of Trackhouse Racing drivers had a strong showing in Saturday’s qualifying session with teammates, Ross Chastain and Connor Zilisch, both earning top-five starting positions for tomorrow’s race. · Spire Motorsports’ Michael McDowell landed second on the final speed chart to earn his best qualifying effort of the season and back-to-back front-row sweeps for the Bowtie brigade. |
| NASCAR Cup SeriesWatkins Glen InternationalGo Bowling at The GlenTeam Chevy Post-Qualifying ReportMay 9, 2026 |
Van Gisbergen, McDowell Lead Chevrolet to Second-Straight Front-Row Sweep |
| TEAM CHEVY UNOFFICIAL TOP-10 STARTING LINEUP: 1st – Shane van Gisbergen2nd – Michael McDowell4th – Ross Chastain5th – Connor Zilisch | MEDIA RESOURCES: Photo Gallery | Race AdvancesChevrolet Newsroom |
· For the first time this season and the fifth time in his NASCAR Cup Series career, Shane van Gisbergen will lead the NASCAR Cup Series to the green flag from to the pole position. Laying down a best-lap of 71.165 seconds around the upstate New York circuit, the road course ringer led Chevrolet to its third pole win of the 2026 season. The trio of Trackhouse Racing drivers had a strong showing in Saturday’s qualifying session with teammates, Ross Chastain and Connor Zilisch, both earning top-five starting positions for tomorrow’s race. · Spire Motorsports’ Michael McDowell landed second on the final speed chart to earn his best qualifying effort of the season and back-to-back front-row sweeps for the Bowtie brigade. |
 Shane van Gisbergen, No. 97 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet – Pole Win QuotesJust how different or similar is it with the Cup car here with the track limits now that you’ve experienced it?“Yeah, only turn one I find different. You really have to brake a bit earlier and harder to stop the corner, and then you’ve got no margin for error. Like you were trying to stay relatively tight last year, but you could blow the corner if you needed to and still make time. So yeah, it has changed how accurate you need to be at turn one. And then yesterday on the restarts, I really found how much tighter of a corner it was and how much you don’t want to be on the outside. But sometimes you can’t help it. So yeah, it’s a tough corner. The carousel’s not really different, I don’t think.” In following the ghost car on the chart there, it looked like you gained pretty much two-tenths in the bus stop and that’s where you beat everybody else. Is that a particular point of emphasis for you or are you doing something different there that no one else is?“I haven’t studied it fully yet, but I did nail it on my first lap. The first half of the lap was pretty average, I thought. And then on my second lap, I had less tire grip, but it was a better lap so I think I was ahead until the bus stop and then mucked it up. My first lap was really good there, so I probably got it right and maybe the others got it wrong. But generally, that is a reasonably strong point for me here.” How much of a handful were the cars out there today?“It was odd. I expected it to be faster in the cold conditions, which it was, but then the fall off was insane. I didn’t expect that. The O’Reilly car felt pretty good. You could push hard and there wasn’t much fall off. The marbles and the fall off was extreme today. It’s kind of like Bristol when it’s cold, the tires would fall apart. It was very interesting. We fell off four seconds or something. It was crazy. It’ll be a good race to watch, but probably a hard one to manage.” How much of an impact do you think the added 10 laps to this race we’ll have tomorrow? “I’m not really sure. I think you’ll stay out the whole time, it’ll just drag out that second stage. Some people might do something different to leapfrog them into the third stage, maybe, if there’s an option there. But yeah, not too sure. It’ll be cool to see how it plays out.” Now that you’ve turned 37 and you’re still relatively a young guy, even in racing these days, where do you feel you are in your career and how much better can you get, not even have turned 40 yet?“Yeah, I think we’re lucky as racecar drivers compared to other sports. We have a very long shelf life. You see guys competitive into their mid-late 40s or even longer. It’s a pretty cool career we have, so yeah, I can keep doing this for as long as I want. I still enjoy it and I still feel like I’m learning a lot, especially the last couple of years, it’s probably more than I’ve ever learned. I feel like my mind is still open to improving and getting better, and I don’t feel like I’m getting any slower. So yeah, I keep doing it as much as I can.” Do you feel like this is kind of a race to lose? If you do everything right, your pit crew does everything right, you should win this race?“Not with the tires like they are. I think there’s going to be a lot of strategy tomorrow and a lot of execution. Like we saw, Connor made a mistake and just got half a car wide in the marbles and then he lost three seconds for the next few laps, so it’s all going to be about executing. I think there’s going to be a lot of variables tomorrow. So yeah, I don’t think it’s an easy race, for sure. Well, it’s never easy, but not as straightforward. I don’t think it’s going to be like that tomorrow.” NASCAR repositioned a little bit of that tire barrier by the restart zone. Did you tell a difference today?“No, I didn’t even look at it. Jerry from NASCAR told me that they’d moved it this morning, but I was kind of looking at the markers on the fence yesterday. I did track walk yesterday and there’s all the timing lines, so I can see why it tripped everyone up yesterday. It’s very confusing, but I kind of always use the lines on the fence anyway.” You’re one of the three Trackhouse guys doing triple duty this weekend, so when you jump from the Truck to, O’Reilly, to the Cup car, what’s the car or dynamic that feels the most foreign to you whenever you swap?“I guess they’re so different that it doesn’t crossover as much. But yeah, I sat in the Cup car a little early and tried to visualize the lap and make sure I was going the right way on the gears. And then, thankfully with the weather, they let us run wets if we needed to, so that was kind of handy to run the wet laps and just familiarize myself with the car again and then didn’t waste the newness of the slick tires. But yeah, thankfully they’re kind of too different, so you don’t really get crossed over with the gears and stuff.” Give us a little something about the No. 97 team and what they mean to you… “Yeah, you see how much that lap and getting a good result means to everyone. It’s been rough the last few months for our team and not many highlights, but you could feel this cool vibe and energy in the shop this week and how pumped everyone was. We’re three good road course guys capable of results, and it was good we executed and all three of us are in the top-five. So yeah, it’s a fun bunch of people to spend your weekends with. I really enjoy being around all the guys and girls and hopefully we can reward them with a result tomorrow.” |