Keselowski falls short at Phoenix

The statement applied to the closing stages of Sunday’s Eliminator Round finale at Phoenix International Raceway, but it also rang true as a synopsis for Keselowski’s season. Though the next-to-last race of the year ended in disappointment, he aggressively steered the Blue Deuce to new heights this season, winning six times and establishing the team back among NASCAR’s elite after a down year in 2013.

Keselowski was able to pull off a Hail Mary pass in the Contender Round by converting in a must-win situation to stay alive in the first year of the new Chase format. Similar late-race heroics didn’t pan out at Phoenix, where Keselowski wound up seven points shy of being among the final four eligible for the championship Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

“It doesn’t feel good to have won the most races and not being in it at Homestead, but it still feels like it has been a great season, winning six races,” Keselowski said on pit road after his fourth-place finish in the desert. “Nobody is going to win any more than that, and that’s something we’re proud of.”

Keselowski began Sunday with handling issues during the first green-flag run, but crew chief Paul Wolfe made adjustments to keep the No. 2 Ford among the top five for most of the day. It wasn’t enough to catch race winner Kevin Harvick, who led a whopping 264 of 312 laps on his way to an automatic berth in the championship field. It also wasn’t enough to make headway against his Chase competition; all eight drivers with title hopes entering Sunday finished among the top 15.

Keselowski finished second last weekend at Texas, nudging Jeff Gordon in the process to spark one of the new-look Chase’s most heated moments. That kerfuffle aside, Keselowski’s mechanical trouble at Martinsville Speedway in the opener of the three-race Eliminator Round saddled him with a 31st-place finish and too large of a deficit.

“All we could do was hang in the top five there and you never know what happens at the end. We did that,” Wolfe said. “We had a decent car, had enough speed to run second but just nothing to challenge for a win today and that’s obviously what we needed to do with the issues we had at Martinsville. Overall, disappointing not to get to race for a championship, but we’ve had a great season — something to be proud of. We’ve had fast cars and been a contender every week. We’ll go on to Homestead and try to win that.”

The performance from Team Penske’s flagship car marked a quantum leap over its 2013 efforts. One year removed from Keselowski’s first Sprint Cup championship, the No. 2 team went to Victory Lane just once and missed out on the Chase.

This season, the team’s progress made a huge difference in the results column, but it also regularly placed Keselowski’s name atop the practice and qualifying charts. In addition to the victories, the 30-year-old driver won a career-best five Coors Light Pole Awards in 2014 and was a front-row starter 13 times overall.

“To have a season like we did that really sets you back, you’ve got to look in the mirror and see what you can do differently — each individual person and as a team,” Wolfe said. “We did that and everyone came out really focused this year and were able to adapt well to the new rules package, which is important. On a consistent basis, we were one of the cars to beat every week, and that’s probably stronger than we were when we won our championship in 2012.

“It’s just the way things happen sometimes, and with an unfortunate situation in Martinsville, we don’t get to race for a championship, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t had the speed in our cars and have just as strong a team as we did when we won our championship.”

Said Keselowski: “It’s been a good effort. It’s been a great year. It’s nothing to hang our head on. We controlled the things we could control for the most part, and that’s just how this deal works.”

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