We are lucky to have had him race a faster JGR car Trackhouse crew chief said

Chase Briscoe nearly kissed the back bumper of Shane van Gisbergen as they came off the last turn of the race at Sonoma Raceway. Van Gisbergen held on to win by .357 of a second — the closest margin of victory in any of his 14 NASCAR wins to date.

Stephen Doran, who is the No. 97 crew chief for SVG at Trackhouse Racing, said SVG made up the difference on the slower car in the closing laps.“He said when he went to go, he just didn’t have anything,” Doran recalled on Inside the Race.

I don’t know if it was just because I got a little bit of traffic behind the 7 [Daniel Suarez] and then the 51 [Cody Ware] and just warmed my tires up a little bit more than I had before, but he was like, ‘I’m telling you, I didn’t have anything else.“Good thing we got him (SVG), or I don’t think we win that race yesterday.”

“The car just hasn’t been to Van Gisbergen’s liking all weekend,” Doran said in the post-race press conference at Sonoma, saying much the same thing.“Thank God we have him or we wouldn't be here right now,” Doran said. "We did a lot of work overnight to try to get better. I still really don’t know what it was that he didn’t like about it, but he, honestly, hated the car all weekend.I would say it was a little better today, but still not great. “Not so good as last year.”

Doran has been Van Gisbergen’s crew chief since the start of the 2025 season and the pair have combined to win seven Cup races over the last two years. Van Gisbergen is now 14th in the championship standings, 36 points ahead of the Chase cut line.