A day for firsts

OK, so I'd never heard of the guy, either. Van Ginsburg, was it? Van Grizburger? Van Morrison?

Something like that.

But, nah, his name is Shane van Gisbergen, and he's from New Zealand, and late on a storm-tossed day on Lakeshore Drive and Michigan Avenue, he was showing the world his own Miracle Mile. The street course was new and crawling with slick spots from earlier downpours, but he never turned a wheel wrong. Ran down Chase Elliott and ran down Justin Haley, and then drove away from both at the end as chill as can be.

And there it was: First NASCAR street race in Chicago; first guy to win his first Cup race since Johnny Rutherford won one of the Daytona qualifiers for Smokey Yunick: first Kiwi ever to win a Cup race. A day for firsts, it seems.

And if there was a certain symmetry to that, it wasn't like van Gisbergen was new to all this. We might not have heard of him, but that doesn't mean anything. It just means Americans are provincial creatures who don't spent a lot of time thinking about racing in New Zealand.

Where van Gisbergen -- aka, "SVG" -- is THE guy, as it happens.

To begin with, he's 34 years old, not 18 or 19, and he's been wheeling cars similar to Cup cars for 17 years in New Zealand's road-course Supercar Championship series. In that time, van Gisbergen has won three titles, 79 races and 46 poles, and made 174 podiums in 499 starts. And he's won the Bathurst 1000, the Supercar's Daytona 500.

All of that makes him the fourth most successful driver in the series 27-year history.

His ride at Chicago came via Trackhouse Racing's Project 91, whose goal is to give international drivers entree into NASCAR. And if you're looking for international drivers with experience in Cup-type cars, you weren't going to look very long before you found van Gisbergen.

So, yeah, a day for firsts. But not necessarily a day for surprises.