Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Watkins Glen International was the Shane van Gisbergen show, as the Trackhouse Racing driver dominated the field en route to picking up his fourth win of the season. Van Gisbergen’s dominance aside, Jeff Gluck of The Athletic did not have a favorable opinion of the race.
Speaking on “The Teardown” podcast, Gluck called it the “worst race I’ve seen.” Gluck called for fewer road courses on the schedule as a result of what he watched over the course of two hours and change at Watkins Glen.
“In the moment right now, I want fewer road courses,” Gluck said. “In fact, I’m revising my previous of ‘Hey, maybe only three or four a year is fine.’ I mean, I’m almost let’s get back to one or two at this point, and I don’t know what you cut, but this is horrible. SVG aside, this just was not any sort of a good race today. In my mind, this is the worst race I’ve seen. I don’t see any redeeming qualities in this race. This was a really bad stinker.
“I don’t think anything would have changed it — maybe you take out SVG, and the field is so much closer, and it would have been competitive, and Christopher Bell passed Chris Buescher on the last lap, blah, blah, blah. SVG is in the race, the Next Gen car is the car they’re racing, they do have stage breaks, so would that have changed some strategy? Probably not, there’s probably nothing you can do to thwart SVG. So, I don’t know what you do, but let’s face it — he’s [van Gisbergen] stinking up the show and the races with the Next Gen car on road courses aren’t good anyway.”
NASCAR insider goes off on current road course product
Sunday at Watkins Glen didn’t provide many fireworks the same way last year’s race did when Buescher made a last lap pass on van Gisbergen. The New Zealand native made easy work of his competition, beating Bell to the start-finish line by 11.116 seconds.
Van Gisbergen’s road course supremacy has been a constant this season, as he’s won four of the five this with still one to go. Next season, we know there will be one less road course on the schedule with Mexico City and Chicago off, and San Diego in. Five road course races is still about two to three too many for Gluck.
“Certainly, I don’t think there’s any argument to keep this current number of six per year. This is not good,” Gluck said. “This race was two hours and 10 minutes or something crazy like that… when you get to a two-hour race and you’re just like, ‘I can’t wait for this to end, no more please, we’ve seen enough,’ that’s not good. The NASCAR road course product right now is really, really hurting.”
