SONOMA, Calif. (AP) — Shane van Gisbergen proved in his NASCAR debut to be an elite road and street course racer by winning in his first career outing.
Two years later, his rivals have gotten a good look at the New Zealander's technique and have declared him the favorite to win Sunday at Sonoma Raceway. He will start from the pole for the second consecutive week and third time in five races.
“It's pretty awesome, we've had a really cool couple of weeks,” said the Trackhouse Racing driver. “It's so cool how stoked everyone is and you feel the energy in the shop when you walk in. It's just a cool atmosphere in the shop, everyone is lifted up.”
Van Gisbergen is on a two-race winning streak on the specialty courses following victories on the road course in Mexico City (where he won by 16.6 seconds from the pole) and last Sunday on the streets of Chicago (again from the pole). He has five consecutive finishes of seventh or higher dating back to Watkins Glen International last September.
“He's so good and it's rare that you see somebody stand out like that and distance himself from the competition,” said Kyle Larson, last year's winner at Sonoma. “He's way, way, way better than us at the road course stuff.”
The secret, his rivals have learned, is a toe-heel braking technique that none of them can master.
“If I tried to learn what he's doing, it would take me until I retire,” Kyle Busch said.
Added Larson: “You can't teach an old dog new tricks. There's zero chance I can learn how to do that.”
Van Gisbergen, who won at Sonoma in his Xfinity Series debut last year and started from the pole Saturday in that race, will be making his Cup debut Sunday on the picturesque track in Northern California's wine country.
He is beatable, said Denny Hamlin, but it won't be easy for any driver to stop van Gisbergen's dominance.
“I think you are going to need things to not go his way, and then someone is going to have to really hit it,” Hamlin said. “That, to me, is probably going to be challenging. Cautions could turn things upside down. He is beatable, on speed alone, but I would say outright pace? No.”
In addition to the way van Gisbergen brakes, Hamlin commended the way the Kiwi approaches the courses.
“His approach to how he attacks certain corners seems to be the thing where we're more reactive,” Hamlin said. “I'm more reactive to seeing how someone approaches a corner to go fast. He's proactive and knows how to approach it, so he's better and faster before I am. And by the time I start to get closer, he then refines his technique and goes even faster.”
Joey Logano had little to offer on his current feud with Ross Chastain. It heated up last week at Chicago when Chastain spun Logano in a retaliatory move that sent Logano to NASCAR to demand punishment for a deliberate action.
NASCAR did not penalize Chastain and the two drivers have not spoken since Sunday's postrace confrontation.
“We haven't talked,” Logano said Saturday. “It is what it is.”
Logano didn't want to talk about Chastain, anyway.
“He made his choices. I'm just going to go race my car,” Logano said.
As for Chastain? He maintained that “there's three sides to every story."
“I think that a lot of people were all running into each other for the last couple of laps,” Chastain said. “That's what I saw.”
Bubba Wallace tried to fix his frayed relationship with Alex Bowman as soon as they arrived in California earlier this week.
The two had an incident at Chicago for the second consecutive year and have had other run-ins in the past. After the latest dustup, Bowman expressed surprise that the two were still having issues.
“I thought we had squashed our beef, but clearly we have not," Bowman said in Chicago.
To prove to Bowman that they had indeed moved on, Wallace said he saw Bowman in a Napa Valley restaurant, approached him from behind and wrapped him in a bear hug. He later paid for Bowman's dinner.
“I told him I messed up like an idiot,” Wallace said of his driving at Chicago. “I apologized. I was down for a couple days about it. So I bought him a meal. It felt right.”
AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
Shane van Gisbergen, center, holds the trophy after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at the Grant Park 165, Sunday, July 6, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)
Shane van Gisbergen drives to Victory Lane after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at the Grant Park 165, Sunday, July 6, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s second term has been eventful. You wouldn’t know it from his approval numbers.
An AP-NORC poll from January found that about 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of Trump’s performance as president. That’s virtually unchanged from March 2025, shortly after he took office for the second time.
The new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research does show subtle signs of vulnerability for the Republican president. Trump hasn’t convinced Americans that the economy is in good shape, and many question whether he has the right priorities when he’s increasingly focused on foreign intervention. His approval rating on immigration, one of his signature issues, has also slipped since he took office.
Here’s how Americans’ views of Trump have — and haven’t — changed over the past year, according to AP-NORC polling.
Call it a gift or a curse — for all his unpredictability, Trump's approval numbers just don't change very much.
This was largely the case during his first term in office, too. Early in his first term, 42% of Americans approved of how he was handling the presidency. There were some ups and downs over the ensuing years, but he left office with almost the same approval.
That level of consistency on presidential approval numbers could be the new normal for U.S. politics — or it could be unique to Trump. Gallup polling since the 1950s shows that presidential approval ratings have grown less variable over time. But President Joe Biden had a slightly different experience. Biden, a Democrat, entered the White House with higher approval numbers than Trump has ever received, but those fell rapidly during his first two years in office, then stayed low for the remainder of his term.
Most Americans have held a critical view of Trump throughout his time in office, and Americans are twice as likely to say he's focused on the wrong priorities than the right ones. About half of U.S. adults say he’s mostly focusing on the wrong priorities one year into his second term, and approximately 2 in 10 say he’s mostly focused on the right priorities. Another 2 in 10, roughly, say it’s been about an even mix, and 14% say they don't have an opinion.
The economy has haunted Trump in his first year back in the White House, despite his insistence that “the Trump economic boom has officially begun.”
Just 37% of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling the economy. That’s up slightly from 31% in December — which marked a low point for Trump — but Trump started out with low approval on this issue, which doesn’t give him a lot of room for error.
The economy is a new problem for Trump. His approval rating on this issue in his first term fluctuated, but it was typically higher. Close to half of Americans approved of Trump’s economic approach for much of his first White House stint, and he’s struggled to adjust to this as a weak point. Americans care a lot more about costs than they did in Trump’s first term, and, like Biden, he’s persistently asserted that the U.S. economy is not a problem while the vast majority describe it as “poor.”
About 6 in 10 U.S. adults say Trump has done more to hurt the cost of living in his second term, while only about 2 in 10 say he’s done more to help. About one-quarter say he hasn't made an impact.
When Trump entered office, immigration was among his strongest issues. It’s since faded, a troubling sign for Trump, who campaigned on both economic prosperity and crackdowns to illegal immigration.
Just 38% of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling immigration, down from 49% in March. The poll was conducted Jan. 8-11, shortly after the death of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis.
But there are signs that Americans still give Trump some leeway on immigration issues. About half of U.S. adults say Trump has “gone too far” when it comes to deporting immigrants living in the country illegally, which is unchanged since April, despite an immigration crackdown that spread to cities across the U.S. in the second half of the year.
Nearly half of Americans, 45%, say Trump has helped immigration and border security “a lot” or “a little” in his second term. This is an area where Democrats are more willing to give Trump some credit. About 2 in 10 Democrats say Trump has helped on this issue, higher than the share of Democrats who say he's helped on costs or job creation.
Trump has focused his attention more on foreign policy in his second term, and polling shows most Americans disapprove of his approach.
But much like Trump's overall approval, views of his handling of foreign policy have changed little in his second term, despite wide-ranging actions including his push to control Greenland and the recent military capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
About 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the issue of foreign policy, and most Americans, 56%, say Trump has “gone too far” in using the U.S. military to intervene in other countries.
Trump’s continued focus on global issues could be a liability given its sharp contrast with the “America First” platform he ran on and Americans’ growing concern with costs at home. But it could also be hard to shift views on the issue — even if Trump takes more dramatic action in the coming months.
The AP-NORC poll of 1,203 adults was conducted Jan. 8-11 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
President Donald Trump holds a bill that returns whole milk to school cafeterias across the country, in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
FILE - President Donald Trump waves after arriving on Air Force One from Florida, Jan. 11, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
