The Shane van Gisbergen driving style that has surprised Nascar rivals

Shane van Gisbergen’s victory on debut isn’t the only thunderbolt he dropped on the Nascar paddock in Chicago over the weekend.

The three-time Supercars champion can’t see what the big deal is over his heel and toe braking style and jokingly reckons Nascar drivers have developed a “foot fetish” over it.

But following his sensational win on debut on the street course, Nascar drivers could look to normalise the Supercars style of braking.

“Everyone’s got a bit of a foot fetish, it’s a bit weird for me,” van Gisbergen told the NBC broadcast as his driving style became one of the stories of the weekend before his epic victory.

It might sound crazy to most of us given the speed involved but the majority of the Supercars field uses the heel-toe style, of touching the clutch with the left foot and braking with the right but also squeezing the throttle with the right ankle all at the same time.

“We use it a bit to control the rear locking, so I was doing it sometimes a bit,” he said. “Yeah, quite different, [but] seems normal to us [Supercars drivers],” van Gisbergen said.

“We have a flat-shift system on the way up but, here [Nascar], you have to lift the throttle very quickly on the up change where we just hold it flat over there [Supercars],’’ he said on NBC.

“That’s just normal for me, we [Supercars] always right-foot brake and blip on the down change.”

When NBC shared video footage of van Gisbergen’s fancy footwork to social media, fellow Kiwi and three-time Supercars champion Scott McLaughlin, who was cheering van Gisbergen on, gave his seal of approval.

Daniel Suarez, van Gisbergen’s Nascar teammate at the weekend, struggled to work out what he described as the Kiwi’s “fancy footwork”.

“We have the same pedals and I don’t understand how he gets his ankles and his feet to do what he’s doing,” he said. “I’m a left-foot braker in a Nascar race car.”