For the first time in his Cup Series career, Shane van Gisbergen was called into the NASCAR hauler. He did not come out sounding chastened.
The governing body summoned van Gisbergen and Austin Hill to a 17-minute meeting at EchoPark Speedway ahead of Saturday night's Quaker State 400, a fortnight of on-track needle finally forcing officials to intervene. It followed the pair's collision at Chicagoland the previous weekend, where van Gisbergen tapped Hill into the outside wall and Hill retaliated under caution, slamming into the New Zealander's No. 97 Trackhouse Chevrolet. Neither driver was penalised. It was their third flashpoint in four races, a run stretching back to Pocono.
Van Gisbergen offered only a wry line as he left the hauler.
"It went. It was interesting," he said.
He was more forthcoming about how he sees the relationship. The three-time Supercars champion, who has built a reputation in the United States as a driver quick to square things away, framed Hill as an outlier among his rivals.
"I feel like everyone here, I've been able to race with respect... I feel like everyone's receptive, and I can move on quick," he said. "You can just chat to people, and it moves on. I never feel like I've been able to talk to Austin like that. And then he just backs up and resorts to threatening violence. It's a weird, weird thing."
Asked whether he would be cowed by the meeting or the threats, van Gisbergen was blunt: "I'm not going to back down or be threatened by someone." He insisted the Chicagoland contact was never meant to boil over. "I definitely didn't want to wreck a race car, and I definitely didn't want to escalate," he said, adding that "one person was more remorseful than the other" inside the hauler.
He stopped short of calling it a feud. "I don't really know if it's a rivalry, but whatever it's been between us the last three years, we never seem to race well together."
Hill's account was shorter and cooler. The Richard Childress Racing driver played down the specifics, saying only that officials had drawn a line.
"Just the incident, and how to move forward. That's all," Hill said of the conversation. "NASCAR let us know what we need to do going forward. We're going to go race and, yeah, I'm looking forward to it."
Where van Gisbergen framed the sit-down as one-sided, Hill suggested it had cleared the air. Asked whether the matter was finally settled, he replied, "I sure hope so." Pressed on why the two keep colliding, he offered no theory. "That's a great question. I don't have an answer for it," he said.
NASCAR, which cleared both drivers of wrongdoing after Chicagoland, has now put them on notice that a repeat will not be tolerated. Whether that message lands is another matter. Van Gisbergen left Atlanta unwilling to concede an inch, and with the two due to share a race track again within days, the truce brokered in the hauler looks fragile.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/van-gisbergen-wont-back-down-after-nascar-summons-him-and-hill). Visit for full coverage.*