CONCORD, N.C. – One quarter down in the 2025 Cup Series season, Brad Keselowski and the No. 6 RFK Racing team are trailing big time to their competitors.
Whether you’re a supporter of the driver or the organization at large, the numbers will make you want to look away from how the 2012 series titleholder has performed in his 16th full-time season.
The stat sheet is full of goose eggs across the board for Keselowski … zero wins, zero top fives, zero top 10s, zero poles and zero laps led. The numbers that are ballooned are the ones you don’t want to see with a high value – 31st in points and a 25th-place average finish.
Keselowski will be the first to tell you that the start to this season has been less than optimal, but he’s begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
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“It’s definitely a lot of scratching and clawing. Our company went through a lot of changes; my team went through a lot of changes,” Keselowski said Tuesday in a media availability at the NASCAR Productions Facility. “We haven’t recognized the step forward. Hopefully, soon we’ll recognize the two steps forward with all the changes we made, but we definitely took a step backward in the process.”
It hasn’t been for the lack of effort from the No. 6 camp, but the running position at the time of each checkered flag this season has been unfavorable. Keselowski’s best finish so far this season was 11th at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in March and with RFK teammates Ryan Preece and Chris Buescher netting top 10s on a consistent basis, it appeared a track like Darlington would flip the switch for Keselowski.
It very much did not.
A loose wheel forced the No. 6 Ford to limp back to pit road at the “Lady in Black,” stifling what was a top-10 capable car to a 33rd-place finish.
The statistics indicate it’s the worst start for Keselowski since his rookie season in 2010, but the 41-year-old veteran sees the positives in his car’s performance and from his crew.
“It’s definitely not my best start,” Keselowski admitted. “But, I mean, I got my internal optimist glasses on and I see the potential. The potential for this team is higher than any team I’ve had in the last four or five years. Just got to recognize it. There’s a lot of talent on it, a lot of fresh faces and the mistakes that come with that, and we have to clean that up and recognize our potential.”
That potential can be recognized this Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway (3 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), where anyone in the field has a fair shot to nab a win and a provisional spot in the 2025 postseason. It’s also a track where Keselowski has won six times in his career; the most among active drivers and tied with Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. for second-most victories all time at the 2.66-mile Alabama behemoth.
With racing at Talladega evolving in recent years and fresh off runner-up results in both Cup events last season, Keselowski has embraced the superspeedway as a “thinking man’s race” and knows he may be best positioned to capitalize despite his early-season misfires.
“The goal is to be in the middle of the bee’s nest, right? And come out on top,” Keselowski said. “That’s actually really hard. The gaps are very small. The commitment level is very high. You have to get comfortable with the fact that you have an extremely limited visibility. That’s not just because of the helmets or the head surrounds, or even the car itself. It’s because you’re in the middle of a pack and you can’t see through the cars you’re around. In a lot of ways, you’re driving at 190-plus miles an hour and your reference points are very poor. So it’s a really unique environment that’s hard to get comfortable with, and I think that’s the challenge. That’s part of the fun about it, being in this really difficult environment and trying to come out on top of it. I think that’s super rewarding.”
No one knows how to find the reward at Talladega more than Keselowski does, and if there’s any other incentive to flip the No. 6 team’s fortunes in one race, they can look toward a driver who struggled through the first half just last season as a strong reference point.
Joey Logano, a longtime former teammate of Keselowski’s at Team Penske, leaned on his lone regular-season win at Nashville in 2024 to make the postseason and eventually alchemized that into three playoff wins and a third Cup Series championship for the No. 22 stable.
It doesn’t necessarily need to happen this Sunday – though the window is closing – but Talladega is going to be one of the best opportunities for Keselowski to find the jolt to launch his season in the right direction.
“I feel like that can strike at any moment,” Keselowski said. “We just need to trust our process. We’re developing a lot of people and they’re not all clicking together yet, but there’s a lot of signs that say that can and should, whether that’s on pit road or with the team and the mechanics and engineers. All those pieces have to click to have a great race and to win on any given weekend, and we haven’t experienced that yet.
“But we’ve shown these glimpses of being able to get there.”