2012 champion believes ‘a new era’ has come with current Chase format
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. – It’s hard to determine if Brad Keselowski relishes his “anti-establishment” image in the world of NASCAR, but one thing is clear – the former Sprint Cup Series champion remains unapologetic for the way he races and the fallout that’s been known to follow.
“You know you’re doing something … right in this sport when you’re racing the establishment and you make them upset,” Keselowski, 30, said Wednesday during the annual Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour presented by Technocom. “When you make them upset under the terms that I did – I made guys mad racing for the win, it wasn’t racing for 20th.
“If you get in a wreck and a fight racing for 20th, that doesn’t make SportsCenter. You get in a wreck and a fight with a previous champion racing for a championship, going for a win then you’re probably doing the right things.”
The Team Penske driver won a career-best six races last season and he and teammate Joey Logano were consistently fast throughout the course of the 36-race season. But it was incidents during the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup with Joe Gibbs Racing drivers Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth at Charlotte, as well as a post-race brawl at Texas with four-time champion Jeff Gordon, that thrust Keselowski, and the sport, into the glare of the national spotlight.
Kenseth and Gordon both questioned not only Keselowski’s actions on the track, but his unrepentant attitude after such incidents. Hamlin simply described he 2012 champ as “out of control.”
Keselowski said such episodes either during the race or afterward didn’t affect him personally. Taking a big picture view, such altercations showed that “there’s a new era coming in this sport with this Chase,” he said.
“Honestly, it’s already arrived. You’re going to have to be very aggressive to win championships under this format. That was probably the lesson I learned – more so about the sport than anything else.”
That others were angry, he said, wasn’t surprising, noting “you should be upset when you don’t win.”
The Chase format – which consists of four rounds with wins in any round by a qualified driver guaranteeing advancement into the next round – increased the on-track intensity and aggressive nature of the competition 10-fold. Evidence was impossible to miss.
“We certainly saw that with some moves I made, and I wasn’t the only driver,” he said. “We saw that out of Kevin (Harvick) at the end; and Ryan Newman at the end. And I’m sure there was more than that. I don’t view that as a bad thing. I think that’s great for the sport. I think our fans will respond to that in the long term; that’s what we should be aiming for is what makes our fans happy.”
Racing defensively and protecting one’s position went out the window with the new format, he said, noting that, “when that … mentality disappears from how the races play out, you see more aggressiveness.
“I think you see more heated moments. You see a lot of different things that I think are, in general, good for the sport.”