Shane van Gisbergen can finally get over his one regret from the 2025 season. Last year, the Trackhouse Racing driver fetched five NASCAR Cup Series race trophies. All of them were at road courses, and he is one race win away from tying Jeff Gordon’s streak. One road course that slipped from his hands was COTA, where Christopher Bell hoisted the trophy. With the new changes in 2026, however, SVG is confident in overturning his fate.

Shane van Gisbergen is ready for a ‘holiday’

“It’s just more passing opportunities. I guess you get more laps and you get to use the better part of the track more often,” Shane van Gisbergen told PRN Live. “So it was cool when they first thought about doing the shortcut, they wanted to do what we did in V8 supercars 2013. And it was terrible through there. But what they came up with using the next cut through made another passing zone and a pretty tough corner onto the back straight. So I thought it was a good change.”

The Circuit of the Americas track was already revamped ahead of 2025. Officials truncated it from the 3.41-mile full Grand Prix circuit to a shorter 2.3-mile layout. This shortened the lap distance by about 30 percent while stretching the Cup race to 82 laps.

This year, tweaks have been made to Turn 6, including an AI-backed track limit enforcement. AI-fed cameras will also join the watchtower to flag cars that wander beyond the white lines. As Shane van Gisbergen mentioned, the 95-lap race will be held on a layout similar to the shortened version the Supercars famously raced on in 2013. Back then, SVG bounced back from a tough start to record a pair of top fives and a podium.

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Now, Shane van Gisbergen professed to feeling relaxed ahead of this weekend’s COTA race. He scored his first top-ten finish of 6th on an oval last weekend in Atlanta. Now, the road course racing legend will tread familiar ground.

“These road courses, we just go and have fun, they are like a holiday for us,” van Gisbergen said.

As Shane van Gisbergen gets comfortable in his schedule, other drivers are also following suit.

A chorus of agreement with the Kiwi

COTA’s changes impressed not just Shane van Gisbergen, but his rivals as well. The fresh changes for 2026 have appeared after complaints surfaced during last year’s race about drivers cutting the corner at Turn 6 on the Austin road course. The new layout brings a tighter loop that keeps cars in view and eases strain on brakes. This prompted waves of relief across the NASCAR Cup Series garage, who expressed their views before fans’ verdicts roll out on Sunday.

“I’m looking forward to COTA. The changes last year took away some passing zones,” Chris Buescher, RFK Racing driver, said. “It took away those max braking dive bomb passing zones, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it did force everything to happen in turn one, which was already kind of a nasty corner… I think it was a solid decision to shorten it up and bring us by the stands and by the fans almost twice as much.”

“I think the short course at COTA is a little bit better for the NASCAR Cup Series and how we race. I’m looking forward to going back and seeing where we can end up,” Erik Jones, Legacy Motor Club driver, added.

Clearly, the new COTA changes are endearing for most Cup Series drivers. We can only wait and see how they turn out, and if Shane van Gisbergen can stun fans again.