DARLINGTON, S.C. — One week ago, when the NASCAR Cup Series’ regular season came to an end at Daytona International Speedway, the first two drivers on the wrong side of the playoff cutline were RFK Racing teammates Chris Buescher and Ryan Preece.
Team co-owner and driver Brad Keselowski found himself close to victory multiple times as well, with all three having legitimate paths to postseason competition in 2025. But ultimately, the teammate trio arrived at Darlington Raceway without the yellow trim on its windshield banners and spoilers that would otherwise indicate them as members of the 2025 championship hunt.
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Buescher was the nearest of those three racers to getting into the postseason, one spot and 31 points short of being one of the 16 playoff drivers. His motivation is no different ahead of Sunday’s Cook Out Southern 500 at Darlington (6 p.m. ET, USA Network, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) than it has been all season: Go win races.
“That’s the only thing there is to do,” Buescher said Saturday morning. “And ultimately, I mean, it’s what you wish you could do every week anyway. Obviously, there’s always a bigger picture (that’s) more important at times. But for us, it’s just go to the race track with everything we got, take chances, be aggressive on them and see if we can’t pull a few upsets through the next handful of races.”
To call Buescher’s season a disappointment would misrepresent the body of work he and the No. 17 team have put together. Buescher ended the regular season 10th in points with four top fives and 13 top 10s — a top-10 figure that ties him with four others for fifth-most all season. His average finish of 14.1 ranks seventh overall after 26 races. But the underlying goose egg lies in the wins column. In a season that featured 14 different race winners, that lone zero stood between Buescher and a playoff position.
“You take away the fact that we missed the playoffs, it’s been a solid year. We’ve been fast,” Buescher said. “We’ve had a few runner-ups and been in contention to win a handful, and overall, our average finish is well on up there. So I mean, it’s been a great year. We’ve had speed at a lot of different styles of race tracks. Obviously, everyone’s aware and we’re proud of that, but ultimately it’s that final metric that you’ve gotta win to make the playoffs and be fighting for a championship at the end. The old way just doesn’t work anymore. So with that, take that speed we’ve got and win this year, but also be ready to show up and win races early next year so that we get past all the talk that we’ve had to go through the last couple months.”
Preece is in the midst of his first season driving the No. 60 RFK Racing Ford. The results didn’t produce that critical first Cup win that would’ve propelled him into the postseason, but he and his team, led by crew chief Derrick Finley, surpassed the expectations of many as the expansion team at RFK, which grew from two teams to three for the 2025 campaign.
“I feel like for a first-year team, we executed really well,” Preece said. “So outside of winning right now, I feel like we’re hitting a lot of the things that we need to hit on. And I would say the last 10 races is all about continuing to build momentum for next year. I mean, we’ve put ourselves in position to capitalize. Just didn’t work out.”
Keselowski mounted a midseason charge to boast about. Through the first 17 races of the season, the 2012 Cup champ ranked 30th or worse in points after 15 of those events. The final nine weeks of the regular season, though, propelled Keselowski to 19th in the post-Daytona rundown, a testament to the strength in speed he and his No. 6 crew found with seven finishes of 11th or better in those last nine races of the regular season.
“We certainly started out this season in a really difficult place,” Keselowski said. “And over the last dozen races or so, I think we’re showing the potential that we have. And if we can keep that level of performance, we’re a lot better team than what our standings show.”
There remains an obvious level of fight throughout the trio of drivers, all cut from the same old-school racing cloth. The difference, of course, is finding a way to break into Victory Lane and spoil the playoff party.
“We just need to convert the opportunities we’ve had to win into wins, and we haven’t done that,” Keselowski said. “I don’t think there’s any big secret to that. I had a car good enough to win in Iowa. Circumstances didn’t play out in our favor, and we didn’t win with it. You could extend that to my teammates who’ve had similar situations where they’ve been close to winning and we weren’t able to convert. You have to convert.”