Editor's Note: This story was originally published on Aug. 30, 2023 ahead of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs.
Only Brad Keselowski would ask this question. Standing in the Roush Fenway Keselowski shop, he surveys a dozen race cars in various stages of construction then turns to me. “What do you see?”
I point out the colorful liveries popping against the black and white of the rest of the shop, give credit to the mechanics working calmly and methodically as opposed to rushing to and fro, and note that with shining floors and glistening race cars, the place looks spotless.
Keselowski scoffs and points to a splotch on the floor ... fair enough, it’s a big splotch ... but dang, dude, really?
Yes, really. The road to the championship -- the road Keselowski hopes to lead RFK to -- requires perfection. A car built with the equivalent of that splotch would be slow.
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I turn the question on him. “What do you see?”
He pauses, thinking through his answer as his eyes dance around the building that bears his name. RFK very well could turn out to be his life’s work, so forgive him for taking time to formulate a response.
Led by Keselowski’s arrival as co-owner before the 2022 season, the rebirth of this once iconic team took a giant leap in the last five weeks. I turn back to the cars. With three wins in the last five races of the regular season, RFK has achieved a stretch of excellence Roush has not seen in years.
Eight seconds go by as he thinks about his answer.
Some pit stops don’t take that long.
“What do I see?” he repeats.
He thinks more.
The colorful race cars being built in this (nearly) spotless shop have been fast all year -- bad fast, at times, though not often enough to secure their spot among the elite.
Not yet at least.
How they got bad fast, and how Keselowski plans to make them like that more often, is one of the key story lines entering the postseason and could define Keselowski’s legacy in the sport.
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Chris Graythen | Getty Images[/caption]
“I’m here,” said a voice coming out of a speaker. It belonged to Jack Roush, who founded and co-owns the team and called in from his home in Michigan. Keselowski took a seat at the head of a long conference table. He brought an apple with him to this Wednesday afternoon competition meeting in advance of the Watkins Glen race. His crew chief, Matt McCall, sat at the other end. Driver Chris Buescher sat on the table’s right side. Team director Josh Sell ran the meeting, and all the key players spoke.
I wish I could reveal tantalizing secrets from that meeting that explain why RFK’s No. 6 (Keselowski) and No. 17 (Chris Buescher) have led more laps in the last two years than they did from 2014-2021 combined.
I wish someone had said something to explain why Keselowski had five more top fives after 26 races than he did in all 36 races last season, or why Chris Buescher has set career highs in wins, top fives, top 10s and laps led this year.
I wish I had gleaned from this gathering why Keselowski had a shot at
maybe two wins last season and
at least eight this season (by his reckoning), why Buescher won three of five races (more than the rest of his career combined), or why the two teams started to click late last season, when nobody but them noticed.
But there were no such revelations. Dear reader, I went to the RFK Watkins Glen competition meeting so you didn’t have to. It was, forgive me for saying this, 17 minutes of advance-planning chitter-chatter like parents might have before a group camping trip. They talked about engine specs, about the weather forecast, about the weekend schedule, about tires, about qualifying order, about where the car might be fast, and about how Watkins Glen’s turn numbers skip some numbers, but I will spare you my meager attempts to explain that great mystery.
The meeting broke no news but still revealed much about how RFK operates now compared to how it used to. It wasn’t what was said; it was who said it, where they said it, and why they said it. All of that was new.
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I planned to make a joke about how boring it was, but at 17 minutes, it wasn’t long enough to be boring. It was crisp, clean, to the point, professional. Nobody hijacked the meeting to send everyone down a rabbit hole, and there was not a hint of rancor, which was common when Keselowski arrived two years ago (in general, if not necessarily at meetings).
Sometimes the meetings are far more newsy and prescient, such as the one in advance of last weekend's race at Daytona, in which the participants discussed the strategy to use if Keselowski and Buescher were running 1-2 at the end of the race. And then what they envisioned played out. In other words, they called their shot.
Even the “war room” in which the competition meetings take place doesn’t resemble the old room. A shiny new table, comfortable new chairs and crisp monitors fill the room, which is named for Jack Roush. TJ Majors, Keselowski’s spotter, says the running joke in the old room was how hot it would be by the end. This one, by contrast, was delightfully cool.
So much is different at RFK that it’s almost like Keselowski has not rebuilt the team as much as he has created a new one. The philosophy behind it sounds simple -- if you don’t like the results, change the processes that create them -- but the execution has been complicated and difficult.
The emergence of RFK as contenders has been about going back to the source of the problem and starting over. How far back they had to go to fix problems depends on how bad the problem was.
As the overhaul of the war room shows, no detail escaped scrutiny. Keselowski got to work revamping the shop on the first day. It was dirty (especially compared to now), and every mechanic had a different toolbox, creating a rainbow of colors Keselowski found distracting. “It didn’t speak to a common approach,” he says. “I wanted every person to come in with the same box, same quality, (to show) ‘We’re all in this together.’ ”
Now the shop is black and white. Every mechanic has the same black toolbox. But Keselowski went even farther back than the new paint and new toolboxes -- to the attitudes of the men and women who use them.
To that uniform environment Keselowski added, or is trying to, uniform traits. Hanging on the top left wall in the shop is a placard with the company’s core values: community, relentless, self-starter, teamwork, innovative, professionalism. “You don’t control results. You influence the results. Big difference,” he says. “What do you control? That’s the top left. You control your values.”
Cars built by people making decisions based on those values will be elite, Keselowski believes.
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NASCAR[/caption]
Back to the question about what he sees when he looks at his race shop. He’s still thinking. As he does, let me say this: The most important trait to understand about Keselowski as team owner is that he thinks differently than most people.
“The beauty of Brad, and the reason I always love working with him, is he has a very aggressive mindset,” says Jeremy Thompson, RFK’s vice president of competition who was among the first confidants with whom Keselowski discussed the RFK deal. “He’s not afraid to throw something out there and just start iterating on it. He doesn’t brood on things; he doesn’t stew on things. He gets something out and then you can work with it.”
Sometimes when Keselowski “gets something out,” it makes Thompson think and/or say “um, WHAT?” but inevitably the idea gets tweaked and becomes reality.
You never know where a conversation with Keselowski is going to go. You’re as likely to talk about late-stage capitalism as you are late-race cautions. He would be bored if all he ever did with his life was drive a race car, and he would have been bored if he bought into a successful race team -- and probably wouldn’t have bothered.
He sees his emergence as an owner as a convergence of his life experiences, from growing up in a racing family to becoming a champion to building Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing from the ashes of his own shuttered race team.
Keselowski started Brad Keselowski Racing as a Truck team in 2007, and he aspired to turn it into a Cup team for which he would drive at the end of his career. That never happened. He had great drivers and good, but not great, trucks. He said they were too often fifth-place trucks, not winning trucks.
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Looking back, he says he didn’t know enough about engineering and manufacturing to lead the team to the elite level. “It took some of my boldness and confidence away and made me feel like I couldn’t do this, I wasn’t good enough,” he says.
When he closed that team after the 2017 season, he helped several employees find other jobs. He didn’t want to just fire everybody else, so he created a new company, KAM, which makes parts for the aerospace and defense industries, using the same employees.
Through running KAM he learned about engineering and manufacturing, and with that came a return of his boldness and confidence. He believed he could lead a Cup team, so when the opportunity came to join RFK as an owner-driver, he jumped at it.
The biggest challenge, by far, has been overcoming “legacy thinking” -- defeating the “this is the way we’ve always done it” mindset. He described a meeting last summer in which he advocated for dismantling RFK’s entire process of engineering the cars -- a bold idea he could only be confident in because of his time running KAM. Baffled that people wanted to keep using processes that on-track results showed didn’t work, Keselowski felt like he was trying to convince a sick patient to get out of bed to get treatment. They would die if they stayed there and yet refused to move.
“Finally at the end of the meeting I got up and said, ‘What you guys don’t understand is, we suck. We absolutely suck. All of us are embarrassed. Are you not embarrassed? I’m embarrassed. But you don’t want to change anything. Do you know how crazy that is?’”
The irony is that by destroying legacy thinking, he’s building his own legacy.
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Chris Graythen | Getty Images[/caption]
If RFK becomes an elite team and regularly contends for championships, it will rank alongside anything Keselowski accomplishes in the race car.
Maybe even higher.
He won’t, he can’t, he doesn’t want, to do that alone.
He must shed people who don’t buy into his vision and hire people who do. He has made great gains there, with perhaps the most publicly visible changes coming on pit road.
A few hours before the competition meeting, RFK pit crew members assembled for practice. They gathered along the pit wall, air guns and tires at the ready, chatter spilling out of them. They are athletes, some of them former football players, some former baseball players, and one, judging by appearances, a Viking. Not, like, a Minnesota Viking, but an actual Viking. He’s so big he has gravity, and if the jack ever breaks, he could probably lift the car his own self.
“Four tires, two cans,” pit crew coach Scott Bowen shouted.
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Everyone looked to where Keselowski waited in Buescher’s No. 17 car. He looked forward. A wood awning covers the practice area, and on one of the awning’s trusses are motivational quotes, including one from Henry Ford, founder of the manufacturer for whom Keselowski drives: “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”
He sped into the pit lane and skidded to a stop. An explosion of activity hit all four corners of his car. Soon the tires were gone, replaced with new ones, and two cans of gas splashed into his fuel tank. I didn’t see exactly what the Viking did, but I’m sure it was awesome.
Keselowski turned off the car and climbed out wearing a long-sleeve gray T-shirt, black shorts, and black sneakers. He gathered around a monitor with his pit crew members to watch what just happened. “Oh, yeah!” one of them said when the monitor reports a 9.8-second stop. “Smoked their asses. That’s a good pit stop there, boys.”
Since Keselowski’s arrival as co-owner, the personnel on the road and over-the-wall crews have been transformed. Keselowski drew them with his reputation in a way Roush hasn’t attracted talent in years, because who wants to go work somewhere that never wins?
Among pit crew members, at least, Keselowski’s reputation drew top talent before the results justified it, which refutes Ol’ Henry Ford’s comment on the truss.
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Jared C. Tilton | Getty Images[/caption]
Now, finally, the answer.
Keselowski nods toward the mechanics and notes they behave more like comrades than co-workers. It’s past quitting time, but they care enough to still be here. “I see a company that has this mixture of hunger and eagerness for the future that has turned a pretty significant corner,” he says.
He laid out a vision to turn RFK relevant, which has been accomplished, and from relevant to contender, also accomplished. The third step is to become elite. The team hasn’t taken that step yet.
A board on the shop wall marked “the title goes through us” has eight categories under each race (win, top 8 car, top 8 pit crew, etc.) meant to measure the team’s status. It doesn’t have enough check marks on it.
Keselowski ticks off seven races (Daytona on Saturday made eight) he had a chance to win this year (“not that I remember them all” ... but I remember them all.), which shows the cars are fast. To be elite, he needs to convert those shots into wins -- and often -- and the other categories need more checks, too.
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As much progress as the team has made, he says, “I still see the blemishes,” not least in himself. “I feel like I’m still a step behind. I don’t feel like I’ve lived my potential yet here, as an owner or a driver. I’m right on the cusp.”
On that cusp he sees his past merging with his present. His arrival at RFK, he says, reminds him of his arrival at Penske 13 years ago. That team is considered a model now. But then it was disorganized, full of legacy mentality and rife with infighting, he says. Keselowski says he feels like he’s “reliving 2010 and 2011,” when Penske shed its failures.
In 2012, after Penske made changes like what is happening at RFK, Keselowski won the championship.
Can RFK make the same leap?
He doesn’t know yet.
But he likes what he sees.