Shane van Gisbergen is −125 to win San Diego on a track nobody has driven. But Reddick already beat him in March and Buescher ran him down at the Glen in 2024. Here are the five drivers who can topple the King — ranked, with odds.
Shane van Gisbergen has won seven Cup races and every one of them turned right. He’s −125 to win San Diego on a track nobody has driven. But somebody already beat him in March — and here are the five drivers with a real shot at doing it again, on a street course where his biggest edge disappears.
Coronado Street Course · Anduril 250 · June 2026 · By PitByNumbers Staff · 8 min read Get the full San Diego card before the green flag. Why these five Van Gisbergen is the best road-course racer NASCAR has ever imported — seven Cup wins, all turning right, five of six road and street races won in 2025. At −125 to win a race nobody has driven, the price is a monument to his reputation.
But reputations don’t drive the car. He already lost on a road course this year, he’s already clipped a wall and handed away a win, and a brand-new street course strips away the data edge that makes him untouchable. These five have a real path.
1. Tyler Reddick — To Win (+900) Start with the only driver who’s beaten him recently. At COTA in March, Tyler Reddick led a race-high 58 of 95 laps and held van Gisbergen off by 3.944 seconds — becoming the first driver in NASCAR history to win the opening three races of a season.
He’s the points leader. He owns four career Cup road-course wins. And he’s sitting third on the board.
The disrespect is the opportunity: the most consistent driver in the sport, with a head-to-head road win over SVG this very season, priced behind the man he just beat. 2. Connor Zilisch — To Win (+650) If anyone in the field has van Gisbergen’s specific genius, it’s the 19-year-old in the other Trackhouse car.
Connor Zilisch came up through sports cars — class wins at the Rolex 24 and Sebring on his first tries, second overall at this year’s Rolex 24, a karting career spent racing a future Formula 1 driver. Then he won ten Xfinity races in 2025, the best rookie season the series has ever seen, six of his career wins on road and street courses. And he’s already beaten van Gisbergen head-to-head — twice — sharing an Xfinity grid.
Now he has the same Trackhouse equipment, engineers, and notes as the favorite. 3. Michael McDowell — To Win (+1400) Now the one nobody can explain.
Michael McDowell doesn’t have the fastest car — he has the smartest pit box. Crew chief Travis Peterson turns track position into finishes faster cars can’t catch, and on a street course where passing is nearly impossible, that’s the entire game. McDowell led 54 of 82 laps to win the 2023 Indianapolis road course outright.
In 2025 he ran 5th at Mexico City, 4th at Sonoma, and led the first 31 laps at Chicago — after passing SVG on the opening lap. That’s the exact off-sequence, track-position game we broke down in the stage-points strategy piece , and a brand-new street course is the stage it’s built for. 4.
Ty Gibbs — To Win (+1600) Ty Gibbs has the rawest one-lap speed in the field and the Joe Gibbs Racing horsepower to back it. He won his Xfinity debut on a road course, led 17 laps at Watkins Glen this year for a career-best 3rd, and broke through for his first Cup win at Bristol in April. When the track turns both ways, the pace is genuinely there — he’s topped the speed charts in road-course practice.
The asterisk is temperament: this is a driver who makes enemies, Ryan Preece torched him publicly, and the wall has ended more than one of his strong runs. 5. Chris Buescher — To Win (+3300) And the longest shot has already beaten him.
Chris Buescher ran van Gisbergen down on the final lap at Watkins Glen in 2024 — pounced the instant SVG clipped the wall, bump-and-ran through the carousel, and won by under a second. He backed it up with a stage win and a 3rd at Sonoma from 26th on the grid. He’s a top-10 fixture, he’s 7th in points, and his crew chief Scott Graves is a two-time champion who lives for the off-sequence road-course chaos San Diego is going to serve up — the same kind of longshot value we chase in the longshot top-10 plays .
Van Gisbergen is the best there is at this, and Sunday he’ll probably remind everyone why. Probably. But he’s −125 on a track nobody has driven, in a 40-car field, on a street course built to create chaos — and he’s already been beaten twice by men on this list.
The favorite is real. The price is a trap. The five names above are how you fade it.