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With Shane Van Gisbergen’s victory in Chicago, he established himself as not only the best road course racer in NASCAR today, but also one of the best of all time. In this list, we’re counting down the best road course racers in NASCAR history.
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For years, road course racing in the NASCAR Cup Series was seen as a fun sideshow. While some drivers excelled at it, it wasn’t necessary to become a series champion.
These days, six of the 36 races on the Cup Series calendar are road courses, and succeeding on them has gone from a luxury to a necessity.
In this list, we count down the 10 greatest road course racers in NASCAR Cup Series history.
10) Chris Buescher
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Bet you didn’t see this one coming! But if anything, Chris Buescher belongs even higher on this list. His 9.3 average finish since 2022 is the best of any current NASCAR Cup Series driver, including Shane Van Gisbergen.
Buescher has an incredible 15 top-10 finishes over 20 road course starts in that span and finally picked up his first victory last year at Watkins Glen, outdueling Buescher in the process.
The RFK Racing driver isn’t just one of the best in the series at road course racing, he’s one of the best all-time.
9) AJ Allmendinger
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All three of Allmendinger’s career NASCAR Cup Series victories have come on road courses, and he’s usually had to due it in subpar equipment.
Allmendinger picked up the first win of his career in 2014 for JTG Daugherty Racing at Watkins Glen. He’s since added wins at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Charlotte Roval.
Like Van Gisbergen, Allmendinger is a threat to shakeup the NASCAR playoff field every time the series heads to a road course.
8) Rusty Wallace
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NASCAR Hall of Famer and 1989 Cup Series champion Rusty Wallace won 55 races in the sport’s premier series, so there weren’t many styles of tracks he didn’t succeed on.
But six of those 55 victories came on road courses, with two each at Watkins Glen, Sonoma, and now-defunct Riverside. He won the final race at Riverside in 1988 and his success on road courses continued all the way until his final season in 2005, when he picked up a fourth-place finish at Sonoma and a sixth-place finish at Watkins Glen, proving that while form is temporary, class is permanent.
7) Kyle Larson
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While nobody would consider Larson a road course ace, that’s solely down to his success on all styles of tracks.
But Larson has six career road course victories, all of which have come since joining Hendrick Motorsports in 2021. He has two victories at Sonoma, Watkins Glen, and the Roval, and history tells us that if Larson can stay out of trouble, he’s usually going to contend for the win by the time the race ends.
6) Ricky Rudd 
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Rudd, like Wallace, is a NASCAR Hall of Famer with a number of wins on his resume. Unlikely Wallace, an uncommonly large proportion of those wins, six out of 23, came on road courses.
Again, like Wallace, Rudd has two wins each at Watkins Glen, Sonoma, and Riverside, and he very nearly had several others, with five second-place victories at road courses in his career.
Rudd finished in the top five in just his second career road course race in 1988, then finished second for the Wood Brothers at Sonoma 17 years later in 2005.
5) Chase Elliott 
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2020 NASCAR Cup Series Chase Elliott leads all active drivers with seven career victories on road courses, and at one point, it felt like he was winning every time the series began making right-hand turns.
In fact, from 2019-2020, Elliott won four consecutive road course races on three different tracks. If we expand that run, he won 6-out-of-10 road course races from Aug. 2019 to Aug. 2021, with a pair of runner-up finishes as well and only one finish below fourth.
Life hasn’t been as kind to Elliott on road courses in the NextGen Era, but there’s no denying he knows how to get the job done when NASCAR steps outside its normal oval comfort zone.
4) Marcos Ambrose 
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With just two NASCAR Cup Series wins to his name, Marcos Ambrose might feel a bit high on this list. But a quick look beyond the base layer of his statistics and Ambrose’s greatness on road courses becomes clear.
The Australian spent his entire career in less-than-stellar equipment, but that didn’t hold him back too much.
Ambrose finished outside the top 10 just twice in 14 career starts on road courses. In both of those races, he was involved in crashes, the second coming after he’d led 51 laps at Watkins Glen.
In the 12 races in which Ambrose finished on the lead lap, he won twice, amassed eight top-five finishes, and had an average finish of 4.1.
3) Tony Stewart
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Eight of Tony Stewart’s 49 career NASCAR Cup Series wins came on road courses, which ranks second on the all-time list. Stewart, who had a background of open-wheel racing, won five times at Watkins Glen and three times at Sonoma.
He finished second in his first-career road course race at Sonoma in 1999 and picked up the final win of his career at Sonoma in 2016. In between, Stewart amassed 21 top-10 finishes on road courses, including a three-race win streak from 2004-5.
2) Jeff Gordon 
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It would be easy to have Jeff Gordon atop this list, as his nine road course victories are the most in NASCAR Cup Series history.
Instead, he slots in at No. 2 with five victories at Sonoma and four at Watkins Glen. Like Stewart, Gordon came from an open-wheel background and it quickly showed when NASCAR took to the roads.
From 1994-2000, Gordon finished no worse than ninth on road courses, including a jaw-dropping streak of six consecutive road course victories from 1997-2000.
Gordon went on to add three more victories on road courses later in his career, and came close to adding more on several other occasions, with four second-place finishes.
1) Shane Van Gisbergen
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While a small sample size will have some arguing Shane Van Gisbergen’s spot atop this list, it’s hard to argue with the numbers.
Since entering the series in a one-off spot in 2023, Van Gisbergen has won three of the nine road course races he’s entered. He has seven top-10 finishes in that span and in one of the two races he finished outside the top 10, he was taken out in a crash after leading nine of the first 24 laps.
Van Gisbergen has won the last two Cup Series road courses and is the favorite to win in the season’s remaining road course stops at Sonoma and Charlotte. He’s doing this all against the most competitive field of road racers in series history and under immense pressure to perform on these specific tracks.
At the current rate, Van Gisbergen could surpass Gordon’s nine road course victories within the next few seasons.