Analysis: Brad Keselowski's Darlington NASCAR Win Capped 'a Tedious, Painful Process' (2024)

• In Brad Keselowski’s 12-year tenure with Team Penske, he had won a Cup Series championship, 34 Cup and 33 Xfinity races.
• Once a powerhouse in the sport, the team Jack Roush founded hadn’t won a Cup Series race since July 2017.
• The triumph at Darlington last week resulted in Keselowski chauffeuring his two young daughters to victory lane in his race car.

When Brad Keselowski left Team Penske at the end of the 2021 NASCAR Cup season to become a co-owner of the team then known as Roush Fenway Racing there were many who questioned his sanity due to that operation’s performance in recent years.

Once a powerhouse in the sport, the team Jack Roush founded hadn’t won a Cup Series race since July 2017. Its last championship had come in 2004 with Kurt Busch. That same year, the team often fielded seven cars in a Cup race. It had two Xfinity Series teams—one full-time and one part-time—and two full-time NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series entries.

When Keselowski arrived in 2022, the organization fielded only two Cup cars, and its Xfinity and Truck series teams no longer existed.

In Keselowski’s 12-year tenure with Team Penske, he had won a Cup Series championship, 34 Cup and 33 Xfinity races and 17 Cup and 19 Xfinity poles. He had finished outside the top 10 in the Cup driver standings only three times.

“I heard from some fans, ‘I can’t believe you’re throwing your career away,’ and then you’re kind of like, well, maybe they’re right,” Keselowski said about the reaction when he left Penske. “I had a lot of people that poked at me when (Austin) Cindric won the (Daytona) 500 … that could have been you in that car. Same thing when Joey (Logano) and (Ryan) Blaney won the championship last year and the year before, and they’re right.

“But I’m not upset about that. I’m in a different place. I’ve learned so much over the last three years about people and culture and organizations and the technical aspects of what it takes to build a race team that can win. That’s the action I crave, always craved, is being a part of that journey.”

Keselowski described the last three years as a “lot of two steps forward, one step back” and admitted the turnaround didn’t come as quickly as he wanted.

“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,” Keselowski said.

Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing—better known as RFK Racing—finally broke its winless streak in September 2022 at Bristol with Chris Buescher. The Texas native won three more races in 2023, but Keselowski’s victory drought continued. Keselowski always said that he didn’t think about it and his crew chief Matt McCall confirmed it.

“You just got to talk about how you’re going to win,” McCall said. “It does us no good to talk about the losing streak.”

McCall said it was difficult to name one thing that Keselowski had done to propel the organization’s turnaround.

“The biggest thing is he’ll keep asking questions,” McCall said. “The amount of stuff that, that guy thinks about during the day is sort of scary sometimes.

“Brad loves a challenge. He’s always thinking. The biggest thing (for us) is just understanding how to keep him at his top level because he has a scary ability. It’s taken a lot of time for us to build his confidence so we can give him something he can drive every week.”

Keselowski said when he initially talked with McCall about joining the organization, he told him, “This is going to suck, this is not going to be fun, there’s going to be a lot of moments of pain here with expectations that are probably unrealistic.”

Prior to Sunday’s 293-lap Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway, Roush told his business partner to race the race track, a philosophy that has proven successful for generations at the historic 1.366-mile speedway. Roush hadn’t celebrated a Darlington victory since 2006. That changed Sunday evening when Keselowski snapped his 110-race winless streak.

It was a win that resulted in Keselowski chauffeuring his two young daughters to victory lane in his race car. They later joined him on stage for his post-race interview. Eight-year-old Scarlett said it was the first time she had ridden to victory lane with her father, and it was “fun”, but she admitted she was a “little bit nervous at first.”

Keselowski cited numerous reasons the victory was special—the win itself, winning at Darlington, locking into the playoffs, having his family and Roush in attendance and that it was Mother’s Day.

“Darlington, to me, has … its own mystique. It’s always been this really tough driver’s track, and to win here multiple times kind of puts you in a crowd of drivers that I think most of us would recognize as elite,” says Keselowski, who possesses two Darlington Cup victories. “It’s like a self-respect thing when you win at Darlington.

“I think no matter what you do in life, you want to leave a mark. I’m just thrilled that I’m able to put some meaningful pages in this chapter, and I hope there’s a lot more to come.”