Brad Keselowski gave Matt McCall one heck of a sales pitch over the summer of 2021 in asking him to crew chief their No. 6 at what would soon be rechristened RFK Racing.
“It’s going to suck. It’s not going to be a lot of fun.”
McCall, and this is the condensed version, simply said he ‘liked a challenge,’ and so began a nearly three-year journey that reached a major milestone on Sunday in winning the Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway.
Keselowski certainly didn’t mislead McCall, and there have arguably been more challenges than they even anticipated since the start of the 2022 season, and it might have split any other driver-crew chief pairing that didn’t share their resolve.
It started well enough actually, with Keselowski and McCall winning a Daytona Duel but that was the highlight of a spring and summer that is best articulated as a gut punch between a major penalty and then performance woes that lasted until the second half of the season.
Since that second half of 2022, RFK Racing has been resurgent with Buescher winning four times through this weekend. In fact, he probably should have made it a fifth on Sunday at Darlington. Meanwhile, Keselowski had a handful of runner-ups over that span, four to be exact, and with Buescher winning, it became glaring that the 2012 champion hadn’t.
Through it all, Keselowski and McCall both say they’ve been able to talk and work through any challenge and never let it affect their directional progress over the past 30 months.
“I think we have open and honest conversations with each other where we are able to kind of have the normal conflict resolved that a team would have and then probably some on top of that,” Keselowski said after winning the race on Sunday.
“I’ve never looked at Matt and said, ‘hey, you can’t do this.’ I’ve never felt that way. We both, I’m sure, have had moments where we’re like, ‘oh, this is not going right,’ kind of moments of doubt. There have been some wins that got away from us where I felt like I made a mistake and some where I felt like we left something on the table with the car, and those sting, but that’s part of it.”
Keselowski says he appreciates that McCall is willing to ‘take risks, calculated risks,’ and that neither of them blow up over them when it doesn’t work out.
“It’s really easy to kind of just point a lot of fingers when it goes wrong and he’s done a great job of not doing that and I like to think I have to when it comes to our relationship.”
McCall and Keselowski were always a natural fit because of their shared approach and resolve, so having a rough stretch was just something they accepted was part of the process, and never wavered in their commitment to each other.
“I think, what is most intriguing to me,” McCall said, “is that in our weakest moments, where there’s a sense of defeat, we keep pushing through. Look at the last couple of weeks because we had some races that I felt like we could have won and didn’t because of a variety of reasons”
Keselowski said there was an inevitability that things would go wrong in their pairing, no matter how much both try to avoid them, but they simply push through them as McCall said.
“Those moments are really painful,” Keselowski said of the defeats. “It’s been painful for me, painful for him, but we found a way to keep building and get better through it.”
Keselowski says they pushed each other to be better over the past two-plus seasons.
So now, that they’ve reached this milestone, McCall says he’s struggling to enjoy the moment because his mind has already turned to the All Star Race next weekend at North Wilkesboro.
“The scary part is that I’m trying to get happy about this,” McCall said. “And I think Brad feels the same way. My wife s going to wear me out by time I get home, because she’s like ‘why are you not excited’ and I’m sitting here thinking about Wilkesboro.
“The reality is that I’m screwed up in the head. That’s what it comes down to.”
Keselowski is going to try.
“I’m probably not going to think about the All-Star Race for another day or two, to be quite honest,” he said. “I’m going to try and enjoy this.”
This is so much more about winning a race, or a race at venerable Wilkesboro, but also about recognizing the moment. Sure, Buescher has those three wins and they came under the RFK Racing banner but this is also a personal and professional moment.
He says he’s heard fans tell him that he made a mistake in leaving Penske, especially when Austin Cindric immediately won the Daytona 500 or the championships won by ex-teammates Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney.
“They say that would have been you and they’re right,” Keselowski said.
But this opportunity with the NextGen car, with Ford Performance and Jack Roush, and a chance to emulate what his former boss in Roger Penske built was too great to pass up and this victory was symbolic of the journey.
“It’s a heck of a ride,” Keselowski said. “So much has changed over the last three years from when I walked in the door, and I see just a group that keeps getting stronger. It’s tough because I feel like there’s been a lot of moments where we took one step forward and two back but those moments led us to the gains.”
He specifically referenced the new Mustang Dark Horse and the challenges it has issued to RFK Racing.
“We took a pretty big step back over the off-season but it was with a lot of intentionality in a couple critical categories,” Keselowski said. “We paid for that dearly to start the year and kind of lost some performance.
“But it was in the name of being able to do this right here: Win races honest and be competitive, and the two steps forward are just now being realized.
“It never comes as quick as you want it to. It’s a tedious, painful process that takes a deep grind at all levels, whether that’s the driver level, the organizational level, the pit crew level. But that grind is worth it when you have moments like this.
“I surely appreciate it.”
This doesn’t suck and Sunday at Darlington was a lot of fun.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.