Keselowski comfortable in Las Vegas spotlight

The event commemorated MillerCoors' 25-year anniversary of its partnership with Team Penske, and Keselowski will drive the honorary paint scheme on his No. 2 Ford this summer at Michigan. Keselowski already has a special history with the car, even though he wasn't yet a teenager when Wallace was collecting trophies in it.

"I have a school picture of me in fourth grade wearing a T-shirt with Rusty Wallace and that big black car on it," Keselowski said. "I never thought I'd be driving that car."

Chalk it up as another Las Vegas moment for Keselowski, who last March recorded his first ever weekend sweep by winning the XFINITY and Sprint Cup races on the 1.5-mile desert oval.

With rowdy fans shouting support, tourists soaring high above Fremont Street on "the world's longest zip-line" and a high-wattage Vegas neon light show surrounding it all, Keselowski talked about his odds for a second consecutive Kobalt 400 trophy on Sunday -- among other topics like weekend "sweeps," safety, NASCAR qualifying and what an early season win can mean.

After an engine problem relegated Keselowski to a 41st-place finish in the season-opening Daytona 500, he arrived in Las Vegas for the first race of a three-race West Coast Swing fresh off a ninth-place effort last week in Atlanta. And he likes his odds to repeat here.

"I think I'd be 6 or 7-to-1, if I was putting my own odds I put it at that, pretty good," he said smiling and recalling that one of his team members lost out on winning thousands of dollars last year, had he parlayed a Saturday bet and picked Keselowski to sweep both Las Vegas races.

"He had the option to parlay for Sunday's race and didn't take it. He put down $20 bucks but didn't take Sunday's race and he was so mad. It's funny to me. I think he would have won like $5,000."

Keselowski admitted two trips to Victory Lane in a single weekend had been a long time coming, especially considering he's a former champion in both the XFINITY and Cup series.

"We had opportunities before and they just never came together for whatever reason," he said. "That was disappointing, but either way you don't take race wins for granted because you never know when they are going to come and you always have that feeling, 'That could have been my last.' But to have two on a weekend, it sure does give you such a huge boost of confidence, a huge boost of momentum and I really feel that helped carry our 2015 season into the success that it was with so many other wins. Last year, this was a big weekend for us."

Always candid and ready to share his opinion on the topics-of-the-day, Keselowski addressed the safety issues that have arisen since Kyle Busch suffered a broken leg and foot after hitting a wall not equipped with SAFER technology in the XFINITY season-opener in Daytona.

"You always want to see more (done about safety)," Keselowski said. "Safety's a difficult question because I think of it more as a culture than an answer. And the culture is constant improvement.

"That's probably what it takes to make the drivers happy, is that culture more so than having every wall covered. I'm not sure if that culture is really there right now. It's not really a NASCAR question, it's just racing in general. I think the racing culture of safety right now is fairly stalled with some economic events and lack of fatality, but that doesn't mean racing is safe, either."

Yet he was adamant that he doesn't climb into his race car worried he's going to get injured.

"It doesn't enter my mind at all," Keselowski said. "I think maybe after Kyle got hurt it entered a few people's minds maybe, but if it's in your mind it's just going to slow you down."

On another of the early season hot topics, qualifying, Keselowski didn't seem overly concerned with the hiccups of technical inspection last week at the season's first non-superspeedway race.

"I think once we get into a normal swing it shouldn't be so crazy," he said. "I thought last week was fairly normal other than the tech inspection side of it. And I don't know if I'd associate that with the qualifying format, that was a tech issue. I anticipate it will find a rhythm and pace and get back to what it was last year."

Last year was a good one for Keselowski, who finished fifth in the championship but whose six wins marked a career-best and tied a series-high mark.

His Team Penske teammate Joey Logano won the Daytona 500, and Keselowski is convinced his team is also ready to punch its ticket to the 2015 Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup this weekend.

"Teammates, with the new Chase format, really play off one another quite well because when one team gets a win and locked into the Chase you can feel the energy, I don't want to say shift, but the focus moves to the team that doesn't have the win -- whether it's new cars or developments," Keselowski said. "You really feel that shift to get both teams into the Chase because it's so important to that team's company to have all the cars in the Chase.

"It is big for a company to get one of their teams a win early in the year and it's even bigger that the other team gets a win if they are struggling -- not that we are struggling -- but if they need a push it can really help them out."

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