Inside The Garage: Will There Be More To Celebrate For Trackhouse This Year?

Here’s what’s happening this week Inside The Garage: Sonoma Raceway (Sonoma, Calif.) — Shane van Gisbergen celebrated his second victory of the season and moved up to 14th in the NASCAR Cup Series standings with his triumph on Sunday. Trackhouse Racing hasn’t had much to celebrate this year. And the obvious question, amid the congratulations and the smiles of a job well done, was whether there would be anything more to celebrate for the team this year. With van Gisbergen having a 36-point cushion on the current Chase cutoff, that isn’t much of a buffer considering that he is still adapting to ovals in his second year of full-time Cup racing. As for the other two Trackhouse drivers,  Ross Chastain is 45 points behind the cutoff and Conor Zilisch is all but eliminated from contention. Chastain had back-to-back top 10s entering Sonoma but settled for a 14th-place finish Sunday; Zilisch, considered a possible race contender, was seventh. It hasn’t been the season that Trackhouse wanted, but van Gisbergen in the No. 97 car is in position to potentially make the Chase. But the road-course events are done for the year, meaning van Gisbergen will have to perform on the ovals. “Now I just have to do my best every week and keep improving, don’t do anything stupid,” van Gisbergen said in his post-race news conference. “[I need to] just accumulate points. I can’t get in stupid accidents like Pocono with people. “Tenth to 15th is good enough for us. And better, if we can, try and get stage points. That’s always been something difficult I’ve found on ovals. Qualify well. Start up front. Hopefully we get better.” Qualifying is what crew chief Stephen Doran indicated will determine whether they can stay ahead of the cutoff. “What we need is better qualifying to be able to start better in some of these races,” Doran said. “We proved that in [previous races at] Nashville and Charlotte — if we can qualify up there — we can stay up there all day. That’s just the last piece of the puzzle with the ovals is to qualify good.” But just how feasible is that? At least next week with Chicagoland Speedway on the schedule for the first time since 2019, drivers will get a Friday practice and then qualify Saturday instead of back-to-back limited practice and then straight into qualifying. “Some weeks I find we can run 10th to 15th pretty easily, and other weeks it’s a battle to run 30th,” van Gisbergen said. “As a team, we definitely need to be better and prepare as well as we can. “Open practice will certainly help us next week. We can try some things. I just need to keep getting better and make no mistakes. It would be really cool to point our way in.” Chastain and Zilisch would need a huge rally to make the Chase. But winning a race wouldn’t be totally out of the question, although they would need to find more speed and execute. Chastain told me and other reporters Saturday that he could see some progress in speed, and they also got through Pocono and Naval Base Coronado unscathed. “The last calendar year, we’ve not had been able to put together weekends like that,” Chastain said about those top-10 finishes. “So through all the chaos, through all the craziness of what could have been the last two weeks where, earlier in the year, we would have definitely been in those crashes.” For Chastain, he does feel that some of it is just racing. He said he just continues to show up and work. “I can’t try any harder,” Chastain said. “When we were crashing and popping brake rotors and not finishing races, I was putting in the same work. The results have came, and the points come with results.” As far as Zilisch, he’s just trying to find a rhythm in a year when it appears he might run well early in an event, he eventually has problems. He has wrecked out of five races this year — including four of the five races heading into Sonoma — and a suspension issue ended another one of his races. He’s 34th in the series standings among the 35 drivers who have been driving full time this season. “I don’t know what I need to do to turn things around,” Zilisch told me and other reporters on Saturday. “It’s been nothing short of terrible lately and just absolutely miserable every weekend. It hasn’t been fun at all. “I’m doing everything I can to keep my head up and stay focused, but there’s weeks it’s just like, gosh, I don’t even know what I can do anymore. I’ll keep my head down.” As a rookie, Zilisch didn’t expect anything to be easy. But he also didn’t expect it to be this difficult. “I’ve had a lot of meaningful, deep conversations with a lot of guys on my team, and everyone in the garage,” Zilisch said. “I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and just tell me to keep my head down and keep digging, and remember who I am. … I know it’ll turn around.” Trackhouse folks hope that it is sooner than later. “We’re certainly better than where we started. That [early] Vegas-Phoenix stretch of the year, we were out to lunch,” Zilisch said. “I certainly think we’re making gains, and that’s good. We take every gain we can get, but we certainly still have some room to grow.” NASCAR Changes Short-Track Bumpers NASCAR got rid of the front and rear bumper foam in the Cup cars for short-track races at North Wilkesboro, Richmond, Bristol and Martinsville. They also made the front bumpers less rigid with different struts. The reason is twofold: Drivers felt the cars being so rigid resulted in them taking the brunt of the small impacts. So this change hopefully allows the cars to absorb more of the impact. And it should discourage some of the bumper-car mentality, as there is a bigger risk of damage with the impacts. Three-time Cup champion Joey Logano was among those who talked to NASCAR about trying to find potential fixes. “I’m glad they looked at it to do something,” Logano told me and other reporters. “Do we need to have the super stiff bumpers for tracks where we are not going fast? “We’ve seen that this car is good on the big crashes, the huge ones, but it’s the that day-to-day bumps and bangs and little things that the drivers get out and are like ‘Oh my god’ because this car didn’t move at all.” Logano said the veterans will be used to having to be careful not to hit the car in front of them too hard or else risk the damage. Teams are not allowed to change radiators during a race. “It’s going to be easier to knock the nose in, closer to what old days were,” Logano said. “It’s good, and anything that can improve safety. I’m good with.” In The News — The revived IROC will be part of the Freedom 250 INDYCAR weekend in Washington, D.C., with a Saturday race. Jeff Gordon, Kurt Busch, Bobby Labonte, Rusty Wallace, Bill Elliott, Tony Kanaan, Helio Castroneves and Dario Franchitti will compete on Saturday, August 22. — As part of the INDYCAR post-race officiating report for the June 21 race at Road America, it stated that Scott Dixon got an incorrect pits closed message on Lap 13. He didn’t pit and then he later had to pit for emergency service. It was an issue of two data information systems not being in sync. INDYCAR Officiating said it had corrected the issue. — Spire & Chris Gabehart filed counterclaims in the lawsuit filed by Joe Gibbs Racing, which alleges that Gabehart has a non-compete clause that should limit his work on the Cup side for Spire and that he also violated laws when it came to confidential information. Gabehart, who took photos of JGR proprietary information, argues that he did not give proprietary JGR information to anyone. Gabehart claims that JGR breached his contract by, among other things, not paying him between the time they agreed he would leave and his official letter of termination. Picture This Social Spotlight They Said It “I need to really step it up on the ovals. We all do.” — Sonoma winner Shane van Gisbergen, who has only won on road courses in his NASCAR career. In Inside The Garage, Bob Pockrass takes us behind the scenes of the motorsports world the way only he can.