Scott McLaughlin Addresses Reunion With Former Rival For 2025 24 Hours Of Daytona

Scott McLaughlin and Shane van Gisbergen are set to reunite and team up for the 2025 Rolex 24 at Daytona with Trackhouse Racing, which is part of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

Scott McLaughlin reminisced about his long-standing professional relationship with van Gisbergen, explaining to RACER.com:

“He’s a little bit older than I am, but I’ve known Shane since I was probably 15. I started at Stone Brothers Racing, and he was the main driver there, and I was in the Dunlop Series, the development series below V8s.

“We were pretty good friends, and when he was growing up, I was right there. And then I moved to Melbourne in 2013 and he went and did his thing with another team. But I moved to Melbourne to be in Supercars, and that’s when we really started banging doors for the first time.”

Their rivalry peaked as McLaughlin joined Penske, a team often in contention with van Gisbergen’s Triple Eight Race Engineering. McLaughlin continued:

“It was things that he did to me and I did to him just because we’re either pissed off or trying to get in each other’s heads. But that was all part of it, and it was probably more awkward, because our teams really disliked each other. It wasn’t rude between the people, but the powers that be, the Penskes and Tim Cindric and then Triple 8 and Roland Dane didn’t really get along. We were the Ford team. They were the Holden team, and it was always just a little awkward.”

McLaughlin and van Gisbergen will drive a Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R in the GT Daytona (GTD) PRO class, with teammates Connor Zilisch and Ben Keating.

Trackhouse Racing owner Justin Marks commented on the upcoming race, as previously reported by Newsweek Sports:

“Participating in the Rolex 24 has been a dream since the inception of Trackhouse Racing.

“We wanted to make sure we could enter with a top-notch partner in Chevrolet and TF Sport as well as a driver lineup that could compete for the victory. We feel like this group we have put together can compete for the trophy.

“We set out to become an international company with a global brand and we took a big step in 2024 adding MotoGP. Today marks another step as Trackhouse enters one of the most prestigious motorsports races in the world with two Americans (Zilisch and Keating) and two New Zealanders (Van Gisbergen and McLaughlin) behind the wheel.”