After SvG and McLaughlin, who are the next Kiwis in line for Supercars?

With Shane van Gisbergen in NASCAR and Scott McLaughlin committed to IndyCar, the pipeline of New Zealand drivers capable of landing a Supercars main-game seat looks thinner than it has in years.

Shane van Gisbergen's move to NASCAR was always going to create a gap. Three championships, a Bathurst 1000 record, and a loyalty from fans that very few drivers in the series had earned. When he won on his Cup Series debut at Chicago in 2023, the discussion shifted from whether he'd made the right call to whether he'd eventually dominate there too. He hasn't dominated yet, but he's committed, and Trackhouse Racing isn't letting him go anywhere. Scott McLaughlin is equally locked in. Two championships with DJR Team Penske, a move to IndyCar that looked like a risk, and now he's a genuine podium contender in that series. He won't be back in a Camaro on the Mountain as a full-timer. That's two seats worth of talent, experience, and profile that Supercars can't easily replace, and certainly not with another Kiwi at this point in the cycle.

Who's actually in the frame

The most obvious name is Zane Goddard. He's been around the Supercars paddock long enough to understand the machinery, has shown genuine pace in a car that hasn't always deserved it, and he's young enough that 2027 is still a realistic target for a proper main-game seat. The question with Goddard has always been whether the right team with the right budget will take the gamble. He's not a finished article behind the wheel, but neither was van Gisbergen when he first came over.

Beyond Goddard, it gets more complicated. Lochie Dalton has been doing his apprenticeship, and the Supercars pathway through wildcard appearances and co-driver roles is exactly what it's designed for, but converting that into a full-time seat requires both performance and money. The series isn't cheap to run, and teams make commercial decisions as much as sporting ones.

Ruapuna and Hampton Downs have produced drivers over the years, and the Toyota Racing Series continues to be the sharpest single-seater proving ground in the Southern Hemisphere for open-wheel talent. But Supercars is a different discipline entirely. The weight of those cars, the way the front end loads up in a long corner, the brake feel on those hard compound pads, it's a skill set that takes years of seat time to build. There's no shortcut from TRS to a Supercars podium.

The structural problem with the pathway

The issue isn't just finding drivers with pace. It's that the Supercars pathway for overseas drivers has become harder structurally. Teams are under more financial pressure than they were a decade ago, and a known Australian commodity with local sponsorship appeal is always going to be an easier sell to a naming rights partner than a Kiwi who needs time to build a profile on that side of the Tasman.

Van Gisbergen came through at a time when the series had more teams and more seats. McLaughlin arrived with DJR Team Penske essentially building a programme around him. Those conditions don't exist in the same way now. The grid is tighter, the team count has contracted, and the commercial leverage that makes a team take a chance on an unproven international driver is harder to find.

Liam Lawson is the counterargument, sort of. He's Kiwi, he's elite, and he's now in Formula 1 with Red Bull. But his path ran through European single-seaters, not Supercars. He's proof that New Zealand produces world-class drivers, not proof that the Supercars pathway works.

Erick Comas is worth a mention too, purely because the pattern of successful Kiwis in Supercars has usually involved someone who got there by an unconventional route. The next one might too.

What 2027 actually looks like

For a New Zealand driver to hold a genuine Supercars main-game seat by 2027, the groundwork needs to be laid now. That means wildcards, co-driver appearances at Bathurst and the Gold Coast, and ideally some consistent Super2 results that give a main-game team a reason to make the call.

Goddard is the most likely candidate if the right opportunity opens up. Beyond him, the field is thin. The series itself is in reasonable health, and there's no reason in principle why a Kiwi can't occupy a competitive seat in that era. But the days of New Zealand holding two or three front-running cars simultaneously, the Murphy and Tander years, the van Gisbergen and McLaughlin era, those weren't accidents. They were the product of specific talent converging with specific opportunity.

That combination doesn't happen on a schedule. The next Kiwi in Supercars will get there when the talent and the deal align, and right now, the deal side of that equation looks like the harder problem to solve.