Matt Weaver
Despite a slow start, Brad Keselowski still feels optimistic about his No. 6 team this season and based on the performance from teammates Chris Buescher and Ryan Preece, it seems reasonable enough.
Buescher is 11th in the NASCAR Cup Series championship standings and Preece is 14th with four and three top-10s respectively. Meanwhile, Keselowski is 30th in the standings with a 25.0 average finish. It isn’t just the crashes at Daytona, Atlanta and Phoenix either as the No. 6 car isn’t qualifying well and just isn’t matching pace with the No. 17 and 60 cars right now.
So what is the current headspace right now for the 2012 Cup Series champion?
“Yeah, I feel like we’re going to do all the right things and get where we need to be,” Keselowski said. “We just haven’t gotten the results. We haven’t qualified as well as we’d like to, but neither has particularly the 60 car.
“In the race, we haven’t been able to put it together – some of it in our control, a lot of it not in our control, so it’s been frustrating, but I kind of have this feeling that we’re getting a lot of the bad luck out of the way very early in the season. That’s kind of the overwhelming sentiment and that if we stay the course, it will come back to us.”
There are a lot of moving parts right now at RFK, from the addition of a third team for Preece and a crew chief change for his team, having reunited with old Penske team leader Jeremy Bullins over the offseason.
“I think for Jeremy there’s a lot of transition coming to RFK, learning all the tools and trying to understand how to maximize them,” Keselowski said of Bullins. “I can see him understanding them to a higher level every week and that improves our communication and ability to generate results, so I’m pretty optimistic.”
Keselowski and Bullins won five races together at Penske in 2020 and 2021 with championship finishes of second and sixth.
Another complication on his periphery as a driver-owner, is the newly announced legal case from Legacy Motor Club against Rick Ware Racing over a charter purchase agreement dispute from over the past month. That has an impact on his team because the No. 60 actually uses a charter that was leased from Rick Ware Racing.
Legacy Motor Club claims that it had a signed by both parties agreement to purchase one of RWR’s two charters but that the latter walked away with ‘cold feet.’
“It’s too early to tell,” Keselowski said of the impact. “If you read the court documents, the majority of it was redacted, so not knowing what is said in there I still think it’s too early to tell.”
All told, Keselowski is 58 points out of a playoff spot, and very well may need to win his way back into the playoffs for a second consecutive season. This weekend at Darlington is where he won his sole race last season.
“We can definitely still point our way in, but we just don’t want to,” Keselowski said. “We want to win our way in. I look at the next four or five weeks and they’re all tracks that we feel like we can win at, so it’s hard to just turn it around in one week, but I wouldn’t be shocked if we did.
“We know that we need to qualify better and we know that we need to – even our race execution hasn’t been bad, but if we’d have started further up front, we wouldn’t get caught up in other people’s problems or get caught up in yellow flags during pit cycles and things of that nature. I feel like, yes, we know what we need to be better.”
