Shane Van Gisbergen is the Sonoma favorite even after crashing out at San Diego. Five drivers have the speed, the history, or the circumstance to finish him. The receipts, not the vibes.
Shane Van Gisbergen crashed out of San Diego from the pole and walked away 17th in points — below the Chase cutline. He is still a -150 favorite at Sonoma, because he is still the best road racer alive. But five drivers have the speed, the history, or the circumstance to finish him.
Toyota/Save Mart 350 · Sonoma Raceway · June 2026 · By PitByNumbers Staff · 8 min read Get the full Sonoma card before the green flag. Let’s start with what Shane Van Gisbergen is, because it’s the whole reason this is hard. Seven road-course wins in fifteen Cup starts.
Last June at Sonoma he started on pole and led 97 of 110 laps — not a typo, ninety-seven — in the most lopsided road-course performance the track has seen in two decades. Last month at Watkins Glen he led 74 more on his way to the win. On a road course since the start of 2025 he has run inside the top ten on roughly nine of every ten laps.
He is the best there has ever been at this. And he is bleeding. He crashed out of San Diego from the pole and finished 38th.
He left the West Coast 17th in points, five out of the final Chase spot, with Sonoma the last road course on the calendar to fix it — eight ovals after this and not one of them is his friend. So the man who never loses on a road course now needs one, on the most chaos-prone surface in the sport, where the walls are everywhere and the tire cliff turns the running order upside down by lap forty. A cornered SVG is either the most dangerous car on track or the one that overdrives into a barrier.
There is no middle gear. Five drivers have the speed, the history, or the circumstance to be there when it cracks. The market agrees.
Here is the case for each — receipts, not vibes. 1. Connor Zilisch Start where the market starts.
Zilisch is the clear second choice on every board, and the gap from him to the rest of the field is nearly as wide as the gap from SVG to him. There is a reason: across every level they have shared a road course, the advanced numbers have Zilisch running essentially even with Van Gisbergen. Not close.
Even. Same trail-braking, same late apexes, same willingness to use every inch of curb — and, conveniently, the same Trackhouse engineering department building both cars. He has never made a Cup start at Sonoma.
He doesn’t need a resume there to scare you — he won the Saturday O’Reilly race at Sonoma a year ago, beating SVG to do it. And at San Diego two weeks ago he led eight laps, the first laps he has ever led in a Cup car, running stride-for-stride with Van Gisbergen until the same wreck swallowed them both. The catch is the only thing standing between him and a breakout: he has to finish.
He sits 34th in points with a season’s worth of crashes and bad luck behind him, and he has yet to post a Cup top-ten. The speed is not the question. Surviving the first restart is.
2. Tyler Reddick Reddick leads the points, and he is the only driver in this field who has already beaten Van Gisbergen on a road course this year. At COTA in March he started on the pole, led 58 of 95 laps, and drove off — the race that ended SVG’s road-course win streak.
He has won three of the last five road races run in this series. When he is on a road course with clean track in front of him, he is a problem for anyone, the –240 favorite included. Sonoma is the soft spot.
His career number here is ugly — a 20.2 average finish across five starts. But don’t mistake ugly for slow: in 2024 he led 35 laps at this track before settling for 8th, and last year he qualified his way into a 6th. The speed has shown up at Sonoma even when the finish hasn’t.
At San Diego he was racing for the win when a cut tire dropped him to 25th — a result that says nothing about his pace and everything about road-course variance. The open question is the grid. Reddick’s Sonoma history is thin enough that where he rolls off Sunday matters more for him than for the specialists below.
Qualify top five and the demons stop mattering. Qualify outside the top ten and this becomes a long afternoon of passing on a track where passing is genuinely hard. 3.
Michael McDowell Here is the stat nobody is saying out loud: McDowell has the best Next Gen-era Sonoma average finish of anyone in the field — better than Elliott, better than Buescher, better than the man you’d have to go through to win. In the last four Sonoma races he has finished 3rd, 7th, 2nd, and 4th. He has not finished worse than seventh here in four years.
That is not a hot streak. That is a specialist. He is a road-course craftsman by trade — a Cup road winner whose game has always been extracting more from a technical circuit than his equipment should allow.
Several weeks ago he validated the form, running 2nd at Watkins Glen, and he backed it up with a 10th at San Diego. The body of work this season says the road-course McDowell is fully present. The honest caveat is the car.
Spire’s No. 71 has not carried week-to-week winning speed in 2026 the way its sister cars have, and McDowell sits 21st in points, below the cutline himself. To win outright he likely needs the race to come to him — a strategy cycle, a late caution, the attrition that Sonoma always delivers.
As a top-five threat, though, he is badly underpriced. 4. Chris Buescher Buescher is the quietest road-course killer in the garage, and the loop data backs it: he owns the best average running position at Sonoma in the Next Gen era.
Not the best finish — the best running position, the number that tells you where a car actually lives during a race before luck and strategy decide the result. Translation: he is consistently up front here, lap after lap, every year. He has three top-fives in his last four Sonoma starts.
He has also done the exact thing this article is about. At Watkins Glen in 2024 he ran Van Gisbergen down and passed him on the final lap to win — the last man to beat SVG to a road-course checkered when SVG was the favorite. He arrives at Sonoma on back-to-back top-tens, including a 6th at San Diego, and just signed a multiyear extension that took the noise off his future.
The focus is clean. The knock is honest: he is rarely the single fastest car, and he hasn’t won since that day at the Glen. His Sonoma ceiling has read “strong top-five” more often than “dominant winner.” But on a track where staying out of trouble and being there at the end is the whole game, his profile fits like a glove.
5. Chase Elliott Elliott’s Sonoma record is the most consistent in the field not named Van Gisbergen: five straight top-tens, three straight top-fives, finishing 8th, 5th, 4th, and 3rd across the Next Gen era and a runner-up before that. The trend line points one direction.
He is also the steadiest driver in the sport this season — a top-twenty in every single race in 2026, the kind of floor that wins championships and cashes a lot of top-ten tickets. And he is in the right equipment for this place. Hendrick Motorsports has more wins, more poles, and more laps led at Sonoma than any organization in the garage.
If raw car speed and a driver who knows the way around translate anywhere, it’s here. The caution is real, though, and it’s why he’s fifth and not higher: Elliott hasn’t won a road course since 2021, and his 2026 road form has been shaky — a 24th at Watkins Glen last month is not the line of a man about to outrun SVG over 110 laps. Sonoma is his one road-course oasis.
Bet the track, not the season. The Catch Every one of these cases still needs Van Gisbergen to give them a window, and he usually doesn’t. He won this race a year ago by leading 97 of 110 laps.
He is the favorite for the correct reason: on a road course, he is simply better than everyone else in the field, and it isn’t especially close. But Sonoma is a tire-eating, wall-lined, attrition-heavy circuit, and the man is racing wounded — below the cutline, fresh off a crash from the pole, with the points pressure that turns measured drivers into reckless ones. When the field tightens in the final stage, the five names above are the ones with the pace, the history, or the circumstance to be in the conversation when it ends.
Get the picks before the green flag drops.