DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Brad Keselowski arrived at Daytona’s Speedweeks festivities during a time of personal and professional growth. He revealed this week that his family is about to expand to a party of six, and the RFK Racing organization that he co-owns with Jack Roush has swelled to three full-time teams for this season.
It’s his trophy collection that also has room for expansion, and the coveted Daytona 500 title that’s eluded him in 15 previous tries is a missing piece to an already illustrious NASCAR Cup Series career.
“Well, for me, it’s the last crown jewel that I’m missing, so it’s kind of like the empty spot in the trophy case,” Keselowski said during a Friday roundtable with reporters. “It would certainly round out a lot of aspects of the stat book for me, but beyond that, it’s a huge win for our company to win the biggest race of the year, to lock ourselves in the playoffs early, to allow our team to continue to develop. We made a lot of changes to our team and to take some of those pressures of making the playoffs off of our shoulders very early on in the season would have some major ramifications. So I mean, there are so many aspects of why it would mean a lot to us. It’s hard to really define it.”
Keselowski makes his 16th try in Sunday’s “Great American Race” (1:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, SiriusXM), which kicks off his fourth season as driver/owner for RFK Racing. The organization will place three Fords on the grid for Sunday’s 500-miler for the second consecutive year, but this time, it’s a launch for three full-season efforts — for himself in the No. 6 Mustang, Chris Buescher in the No. 17 and newcomer Ryan Preece in the No. 60 entry.
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Daytona also comes four days after Keselowski’s 41st birthday, an age mark that makes him the third-oldest full-time driver in the field (only Denny Hamlin, 44, and AJ Allmendinger, 43, are older). Barring an “iron man” style run into next-level veteran status, Keselowski likely has fewer Cup Series seasons ahead of him than behind him. But in forecasting when he could make a decision on retirement, the driver who burst into the rookie ranks in 2010 and became a champion two years later says he’ll know.
“When you don’t feel like you can win anymore; I feel like I can win,” Keselowski says. “I was having a great race yesterday (in the second Duel qualifier) until I wasn’t, but when you don’t feel you can make the moves it takes to succeed, that’s pretty clear to me. And I don’t feel that way.”
Keselowski says there’s no set time to make that call, but jokes that he’s not ruling out racing at age 50 or beyond. “I mean, if I keep having kids, I might need to,” he cracked. He backed up his belief in his capabilities when he scored his most recent Cup Series victory last spring at Darlington Raceway. Sharing that win — which broke a 110-race skid — with his family remains a moment he aims to replicate and relive.
“I have a lot of desire, as much if not more,” Keselowski said. “I have my family, my kids, and there’s a lot of this discourse around when a driver has kids that they lose some hunger and all this other stuff. Like to me, I feel like I’ve experienced the opposite. Like I want to win, and my daughter as we were coming down here, she said, ‘Dad, you haven’t won in a few months, I’d really like to be in Victory Lane.’ That gasses me up, right? Not that I wasn’t trying to win before, but you’re like, that last two laps on the radio, when it’s to put your kids in Victory Lane, that’s a little extra jazz, right?”
Finding that winning formula on superspeedways is a tricky dance, one that often waltzes to the beat of manufacturer allegiances and the subtleties of the aerodynamic draft. Keselowski has been a master of that task at sister track Talladega Superspeedway, where he has six triumphs, but his record here is more mixed — he’s failed to finish in nine of his previous 15 Daytona 500 appearances.
Keselowski will be coming from the back end of the grid Sunday, earning the 34th starting spot after a qualifying race crash forced him to a reserve No. 6 Ford. It’s a grab bag for his teammates, too — Buescher starts sixth and Preece will go off 27th after putting up the third-fastest lap in pole qualifying — but it’s a variety that’s underscored by Keselowski’s confidence.
“I think our cars look as good or better than anybody else. Really, really excited about that, really proud of it,” Keselowski says. “It’ll be interesting to see, the Toyotas have this way of showing a lot more speed on Sunday than they do throughout the whole weekend. So you never know exactly what they’re holding. They’re pretty good already, right? So I could see them kind of turning the wick up a little bit, and then the Chevrolets have done the best job consistently just with the nature of executing that last pit cycle and getting control of the race. They don’t seem to have the speed that everybody else has, but they seem to out-execute on a continuous basis.
“So it’s hard to predict what the race is going to value. The race might value having super-fast cars and might value being able to execute at a high level, or might value something I don’t have top of mind. So it’s a really difficult race to predict, but historically over the last season or two, it’s valued execution.”
Keselowski says the top challenge to RFK Racing’s expansion has been hiring the right people to support it. The other focus is to support Preece, a hard-nosed 34-year-old who came up through the Modified Tour ranks as a brilliant short-track talent but has had a journeyman’s career in NASCAR’s national circuits.
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Preece has landed on his feet after the dissolution of the Stewart-Haas Racing team, and Keselowski says that providing him with the right equipment should also deliver him a boost in his new surroundings.
“Give him fast race cars, put him in a spot where he can play offense,” Keselowski says. “When you’re playing defense all the time, it’s so easy to get over your head. I think you see that commitment with the car, he’s got a great car this weekend, super fast, qualified third, the car drove great for him in the race. I think he’s very excited about that, and that’s so energizing to be able to look out the windshield rather than the mirror. Everybody’s a lot better driver when they’re looking up front than behind, and I think that’s the builder of confidence that he’s going to need, and being surrounded with those right people to go with it.”
Keselowski’s fingerprints are already indirectly on some of the accolades that have been handed out at Daytona International Speedway this week. The top two starters — pole winner Chase Briscoe and front-row flanker Austin Cindric — are both alumni from Brad Keselowski Racing, his namesake team that operated for 10 years (2008-17) in the Craftsman Truck Series.
Besides Briscoe and Cindric, the list of established Cup Series drivers with ties to the BKR days includes Ryan Blaney, Ross Chastain and Tyler Reddick — all of whom have become stars in NASCAR’s top division. It’s a source of measured pride for Keselowski as he reflects on his team’s legacy and as he stands just days away from potentially adding to his own.
“It just makes me feel like I should have turned it into a Cup team eight years ago. But you know, life lessons, right?” Keselowski says with a laugh. “But I’m happy for them and their success, and I try to be really careful because although I played a part in their success, I am not their success. They’ve done their own work and there’s other people that have come into their lives that have helped them be successful. I’m like one stepping stone on their journey, right? But it is great to see that it mattered, that it played out for them and that I could be a part of it. It’s meaningful, for sure.”