Not long after the curtain closed on a resurgent season for RFK Racing, the organization provided a glimpse into the year ahead with expansion plans. The addition of a part-time third entry on the NASCAR Cup Series circuit is a new wrinkle, but the growth has its fingerprints on some significant nostalgia for the team that Hall of Famer Jack Roush started back in 1988.
RFK outlined its plans for the “Stage 60” project during NASCAR Champion’s Week, tabbing veteran David Ragan for the No. 60 Ford in the season-opening Daytona 500 and indicating that additional 2024 races would be announced later. Ragan last competed full-time in the Cup Series in 2019 but has been a regular in Ford’s testing and development program.
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Team co-owner Brad Keselowski said that the Stage 60 effort marks an initial step toward a more established third team in the future, one that he said he hopes to achieve through measured, thoughtful expansion. In the shorter term, the strength-in-numbers gain plus Ragan’s steady reputation at superspeedways boost RFK’s chances at Daytona, where Keselowski and teammate Chris Buescher excelled last season.
“The principle behind it was, ‘hey, we want to get to a third car,’ but just going out, and even if you were to go buy a charter tomorrow and even if you were to sign the right partners tomorrow, you still would need to have people and have assets,” Keselowski said before the NASCAR Awards in Nashville. “And so we realized that we needed to kind of crawl, walk, and run our way to making that a successful venture. I think the premise behind Daytona is that’s probably one of the actually easier races for us to run, with respect to selling a partner, bringing in a good driver like David, and then the success that we’ve had with our cars at those tracks, we felt really confident that we could go there and be competitive.
“Yeah, we want to have a third car for the 500. The last few years, we’ve been in position to win the race with both of our cars, and for a number of reasons it didn’t come together, and we’d like to think that having a third car would give us some more strength that we’d be able to bring that home. So, to be determined on what the result will be, but the intentions are really good, and the effort’s really good, and that’s what we can control.”
Stage 60 bears some resemblance to the advent of similar part-time entries in the Cup Series in recent years — most notably the Project 91 initiative by Trackhouse Racing and the No. 67 ride from the 23XI Racing shop. Those efforts have introduced stars from other walks of motorsports into NASCAR with a focus on superspeedway and road-course events.
Keselowski suggested that a similar blueprint will likely take shape for starters at RFK’s No. 60 car, but he also indicated that the organization has explored IMSA “in the longer term” as a potential avenue for bolstering its road-course program on the Cup Series side.
“I don’t think we’re thinking of it as an R&D effort,” Keselowski said of Stage 60. “We’re thinking of it as a really targeted effort to go out there and learn with new drivers and find new opportunities for new partners and new people within the organization. So I think we’re looking at it with kind of this fresher look of hopefully we’ll be able to sign a few more partners for some of the road-course events and the superspeedway events is really what we have targeted for this year. And if we’re able to do that, we’d like to bring some fresh faces into the sport.”
The No. 60 itself has a limited pedigree in the Cup Series, with only one long-ago victory by Bill Rexford during his run to the tour’s second-ever championship in 1950. But the number holds special meaning for RFK Racing as a benchmark for its years of success in what is now the NASCAR Xfinity Series.
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From 1992 to 2015, Roush-owned Fords with No. 60 scored an impressive 94 victories in the series, with luminaries such as Mark Martin, Carl Edwards, and Greg Biffle handling the driving duties. Among those contributing to the victory total is Buescher, who won three times with the number and drove a No. 60 Mustang to the 2015 Xfinity title.
The reintroduction of the No. 60 under the RFK banner holds sentimental value for Buescher, but so does a reunion with Ragan. Both drivers have been under the employ of Roush and Front Row Motorsports during their careers, but the connection runs all the way back to Buescher’s close ties with the Ragan family upon his move to the Charlotte area as a teenager.
“I owe a tremendous amount of my being here — really simply put — to that entire family,” Buescher said, saying he moved in with them, completed home-schooling there, and working in the Ragan family’s racing shop when he wasn’t volunteering for pit-stop practice with Roush’s group.
Now Buescher says he’s anticipating getting to work alongside Ragan again at Daytona, with the goal of replicating RFK Racing’s dominance there in last season’s regular-season finale — a 1-2 finish with Buescher edging out Keselowski for his third win of the year.
“A lot of history there, a lot of connection, and cool to have a friend in another one of our race cars going to track,” said Buescher, who finished seventh in the Cup Series standings last year — one spot ahead of Keselowski. “It’s exciting because I know the potential we’ve had with our Mustangs at RFK when we come to any track, but superspeedway racing, just to fire off with Daytona, the success we’ve had there with two cars and what we’ve been able to do. We’ve certainly put the rest of the field on notice when it comes to those events that we’re going to be hard to beat, and you add a third competitive car in there with somebody like David, who is extremely smart and ready to go for superspeedway racing, it can certainly just up our chances and figure out how to get more RFK Fords in Victory Lane.”
