Good things take time — and in the case of the three-time Supercars champion Shane van Gisbergen, it’s going to take time to be a top 10 contender on ovals.

The Trackhouse Racing driver’s scorecard doesn’t look too flash to date. Of the full-timers, van Gisbergen is fourth-to-last in the standings after eight races.

His season-best sixth place at Circuit of the Americas is the only shining light in a string of lowly results.

Darlington marked the first top 20 finish on an oval for van Gisbergen – 20th in fact. Once again, he struggled with the same handling problem he’d battled for weeks and weeks and weeks prior.

Darlington might offer some optimism though, even if the Kiwi spent 95 percent of the race cursing that the car was trying to kill him.

Mid-corner understeer and corner-exit oversteer were the name of the game at The Track Too Tough To Tame.

Come the end of the near-300-lap race, the team got a handle on the #88 Chevrolet Camaro — but any chance of salvaging a half-decent result had been dashed by then.

This is not the Bathurst 1000-winning Shane van Gisbergen we all know. This is Shane van Gisbergen taking on the greatest challenge of his career in a foreign discipline against seasoned veterans who have raced ovals since they were children.

Sometimes, it’s worth remembering this is year one. Sure, he has a season of the second-tier series under his belt, but that was in a car with completely different driving characteristics.

In most cases, van Gisbergen is going to circuits for the second or third time, but never in a Cup Series car.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the rules have changed in NASCAR. There’s far less practice, and that’s ultimately conspiring against SVG who needs as much track time as possible.

There are some parallels between van Gisbergen and compatriot Scott McLaughlin. In his rookie IndyCar campaign, McLaughlin struggled to crack the top 10 for the most part. He often remarked that by the end of every race, he’d have loved to restart the race and apply what he learned. In almost every instance, he improved year-on-year and now he’s a bonafide title contender.

There’s a similar feeling with van Gisbergen. He often came home strong in his Xfinity Series races, and the same has been true in a lot of Cup Series races. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for year two to really see van Gisbergen’s ability.

Van Gisbergen loves the challenge, make no bones about it. Supercars, at the peak of the Gen2 era, was a period that the Kiwi dominated, but Gen3 killed his enthusiasm for the Aussie series. Even if van Gisbergen mightn’t seem overly happy, there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

“It’s not the best result, I guess,” van Gisbergen remarked after Darlington.

“But for us, how it’s been going, it certainly is.

“We struggled a bit for balance, but our long-run speed was good and we were able to make some passes.

“We’ll take a 20th. It’s something to build on."

The saying goes: if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry – and there’s a certain level of masochism when van Gisbergen laughs while explaining his struggles to the media.

“It’s been one of the toughest starts to any kind of racing I’ve had,” he chuckled.

“Just need to keep building on it with the team. We’ll get better.

“We’ve just had one thing after another, whether it’s car failures, someone else’s crash, or I’ve simply not been good enough, it’s just something to keep getting better at.

“I was good at this track last year, so that’s good it continued on.

“I feel like I can run with these guys. Qualifying is still a struggle for me, the way the tyre works. My race pace is usually all right, I just get caught up in the shit early on.”

Van Gisbergen heads to the Bristol bullring on April 14 where he’ll probably be lucky to stay on the lead lap.