Keselowski turning big break into career catapult (cont'd)

"It was the break I'd been looking for my whole career, to have that opportunity. It's like an audition every time you get in a quality ride when you don't have a full-time ride. So yeah, it was an audition, there's no doubt about that."

Little did Keselowski know but the whole No. 88 team had their eyes on him well before that.

"Dale Jr. had been watching him a little while and made the remark several times, 'I think that kid will be a pretty good driver,'" said Tony Eury Sr., JR Motorsports' director of competition and interim crew chief on the 88 car. "He just kept watching him. He walked in here one day and said, 'I think we need to make a change in our driver and I think I'm going to see if I can get this kid to come in here and drive.' He said, 'Ya'll need to watch him; I think he's pretty good.' It was that week that he ran Musgrave's truck and ran so good. From them on, he said, 'I better get him now or somebody's going to get him for sure.' We decided to give him a try."

The initial offer with Earnhardt's team was a three-race trial basis. That transformed into a deal that runs through the end of this season, partly because of Keselowski's finishes. He's had three top-10s in the 10 races driving JR Motorsports' No. 88 Chevrolet. Now he's in preliminary talks of a multi-year contract with the team.

Still, Eury said the team is trying to corral Keselowski's gung-ho attitude and transfer it into consistent finishes, completing all the laps and that P-word no young driver likes to hear.

"He's got to be patient and let this thing come around," Eury said. "He wants to do good. Everything takes time and everybody has their little learning period. That's what we've tried to preach to him, to be calm, just go out here and run all the laps and get all the experience you can. That day will come. He is determined to run up front. He's not waiting on that time; he wants to do it now."

That showed once that three-race trial period was over. After finishing in the top 15 in four of his first five races at JR Motorsports, he then crashed in three of the next four events. The first incident -- a fiery wreck at California -- wasn't his doing as another car clipped Keselowski's and sent him hard into the fence. But the other two -- at Richmond and at Kansas -- were.

Keselowski secretly struggled with the on-track product. The team parted ways with crew chief Wes Ward, a tough move considering Ward's direction of the operation and in helping the team move into its new shop last year. That's when Eury stepped in as the top man on the pit box before the Charlotte race. Keselowski finished 11th. The guiding hand of the veteran Eury will be with young Keselowski for the remainder of the season.

Now the focus moves back to Memphis for Saturday's Sam's Town 250, back to where Keselowski's audition run landed him where he's at today and potentially for the near future.

"I'm sure it tickled him to death when he got that phone call and the same day he walked into the shop," Eury said of when the team originally reached out to Keselowski. "There's a lot of equipment here -- a lot of new equipment -- and a lot of people that he's not used to being around. So I guarantee you it would give you a little blood rush when you walk in and see it."

"It's nuts," Keselowski admitted. But he quickly reminded that that was yesterday. This is today.

"You kind of live for today," he said. "I try not to look back. I guess I should look back because I would be pretty happy with what's gone down."