Austin Hill feud with Shane van Gisbergen flares again at Kansas
NXTbets Pro | Published On: September 30, 2026
Hill feud boils over
Austin Hill and Shane van Gisbergen took their feud to Kansas Speedway and kept it rolling during a NASCAR Cup Series race. The latest clash came on Lap 110 in Stage 2 while Hill and van Gisbergen were fighting for 26th place. Van Gisbergen slid Hill up the track exiting Turn 2, Hill brushed the outside wall and the moment sent Hill backward in the running order. Tyler Reddick and Alex Bowman passed him after the contact, adding another hard edge to a rivalry that has repeatedly spilled over into the race itself. The incident carried the same tone that has followed the pair through other stops, with every close-quarter meeting creating another chance for tempers to rise and positions to change. Kansas did not end the argument. It just added another lap to it.
Radio exchange turns heated
The No. 33 team radio showed how quickly the clash spilled into the garage. Spotter Derek Kneeland told Hill to settle down and said they could not keep racing each other like that every week. Kneeland warned that the pattern would end with “wrecked cars and no finishes.” Hill pushed back with a short answer. “I do not want to hear it,” he said. Then he told Kneeland to “just spot.” Kneeland later made his position clear again. He said he had Hill’s back every week, but that they could not keep doing this every week. He also said he was “not a fan of the 97,” a reference to van Gisbergen. The exchange made the Kansas incident more than a simple on-track shove. It became another public sign that the drivers and the No. 33 camp are dealing with a rivalry that keeps drawing them into the same kind of confrontation. The words on the radio matched the contact on the track, direct and unsparing.
Rivalry traces back
The Kansas clash fit a larger pattern that has now stretched across multiple tracks and multiple run-ins. The feud has also included incidents at Pocono, San Diego and Chicagoland in 2026. Its roots go back further, to a tense exchange at Circuit of the Americas in March 2024. More contact at Sonoma made the rivalry personal, and the recent sequence has only added to that history. Kansas was one more stop on a path that has already crossed several venues, with Hill and van Gisbergen finding themselves in the same tense space again and again. Each meeting seems to sharpen the next one. The contact at Kansas showed how quickly a fight for position can turn into another chapter in a long-running grudge. A battle for 26th place does not usually draw much attention. This one did because the names involved carry their own history, and the history is still active. The result is a feud that keeps resurfacing when the cars meet, when the margins shrink and when neither driver gives much ground.
