Keselowski
Brad Keselowski's view from his viral 2012 Daytona 500 tweet (Twitter).
NASCAR Cup Series

Brad Keselowski: Ten Years Since The ‘Fire’ Tweet

February 18, 2022

Pop quiz: Who won the 2012 Daytona 500?

Even if you watched that race live, you likely had to think about it, didn’t you?

Anytime the 2012 Daytona 500 comes up, you probably think of two events that are intrinsically linked, and the winner is not among them.

The first thing you remember is likely Juan Pablo Montoya’s No. 42 car slamming into a jet dryer, the resulting explosion and lengthy cleanup.

The second? The birth of NASCAR Twitter.

Twitter has been around since 2006, but the NASCAR social media community came into its own half a decade later during the red flag period caused by Montoya’s accident.

The exact moment of its metaphorical birth: 9:58 p.m. ET on Feb. 27, 2012.

You may remember when you saw the tweet in question.

Then you may have asked yourself a question asked by many others that night.

“Brad Keselowski did what?”

—

Before Keselowski blew up the Internet via Tweet, he was a MySpace and Facebook guy.

“I got kicked off of both of them,” Keselowski recalled to SPEED SPORT. “Can’t remember what happened to MySpace. I think my account was frozen for some reason that I don’t know. Maybe I got hacked or something. It might even still be out there (We checked, it isn’t). That would be a great time capsule. Facebook, I actually got kicked off for being an imposter.”

Yes, somebody thought Keselowski was impersonating himself.

“Somebody turned me in,” Keselowski said. “I never bothered trying to get it back going.”

In 2012, Keselowski said he did try, but the intricate process of account recovery caused him to think twice.

Then came 2010, the year Keselowski and Team Penske won the championship in what was then called the Nationwide Series.

As a gift from Nationwide, Keselowski was given a new iPad.

“I had a lot of fun with that,” Keselowski said. “I was just downloading apps. For some reason I got into Twitter. I don’t even remember why. That’s where it started. … About a year went by and I was really just fiddling with it. Nothing super serious.”

Eventually, Keselowski came to a conclusion about the social platform.

“Alright, if I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna do it all the way,’” Keselowski thought. “Just started really engaging and had fun with it. Next thing you knew it was that tweet and everything else around it.”

—

A little bit of a reset.

The 54th running of the Daytona 500 wasn’t run on a Sunday.

Like many 500s in the last decade, rain reared its head on NASCAR’s big day. The green flag didn’t wave until Monday, Feb. 27 at 7:02 p.m. ET. Carl Edwards started from the pole while Keselowski rolled off 23rd.

The series of events that led to “The Tweet,” began with 43 laps to go. The No. 30 car driven by David Stremme spun, resulting in a caution and a round of pit stops.

That’s when, as Fox announcer Mike Joy put it, “a bizarre twist to this Daytona 500” unfolded.

As Montoya drove his No. 42 car down the backstretch after his pit stop, something broke that sent the car careening high into the entrance of turn three. It slammed into a jet dryer cleaning up Stremme’s accident.

The resulting mess forced a two hour and five minute pause to the race.

“A lot of people don’t remember this, but the red flag came out with cars active on the race track,” said Keselowski. “Why that’s important is the cars had passed the start-finish line. And we’re in between the start finish line and turn three. And because of the way NASCAR scoring works, they didn’t want to turn the cars back around and bring them to pit road. And the fireball had completely blocked the race track. So this led to this unique situation where the track was red flagged, but the cars were not on pit road. And it was an extended red flag period.”

That left Keselowski, who was scored in 14th place, to idly sit in his No. 2 car on Daytona’s backstretch.

It was the Daytona 500. A fireball was consuming a portion of the track surface within view of the race field.

“That was a once in a lifetime moment,” Keselowski said.

So he did what you’d expect any Millennial to do when they have nothing to do. He grabbed his phone – specifically an iPhone. He took it from a pocket located in the cockpit.

“Every driver usually has a little pocket in their car for whatever, might be wipes, might be an extra pair of gloves or something,” Keselowski said. “And I just put it in there.”

Keselowski took the picture mostly “just to have it, like ‘wow.’”

Thought Keselowski: “Well, I’m going to be here for a while.”

The Team Penske driver typed out: “Fire! My view.”

He hit send.

“I didn’t really think about it any other way.”

 

There’s nothing overly dramatic about what Keselowski was looking at.

Staring out the front window of his No. 2 Miller Lite Dodge, he could see four Cup cars side-by-side: Jeff Burton’s No. 31, Joey Logano’s No. 20, Greg Biffle’s No. 16 and a fourth that’s hard to identify. 

The plume of smoke from the jet dryer accident scene is visible drifting up into the night sky.

That’s it.

When Keselowski’s tweet went live he had roughly 65,000 Twitter followers according to a New York times report from that night.

That number would hit 200,000 before the night’s end. Keselowski wouldn’t make it to the end of the 500. He was eliminated in a wreck with 12 laps left in the scheduled distance.

“It was after that I saw it had blown up,” Keselowski said. “I thought it was cool that other people thought it was cool. That’s all I really thought about it.”

—

Ten years later, Keselowski is in a much different place than when he hit send on his “Fire!” tweet.

At 38, he’s entering his first season as driver/co-owner at RFK Racing after a decade driving for Team Penske.

With more than 765,000 followers he’s still a Twitter guy. On Nov. 17, during his first test behind the wheel of No. 6 Ford, Keselowski posted a tweet showing his “new view” while sitting in the garage.

 

It was a clear reference to his 2012 tweet.

As of Feb. 13, the original tweet had 4,945 retweets (including 218 quote tweets) and 4,486 likes.

By the standards of 2022, those may be modest numbers, but it’s still “viral.”

A decade later, Keselowski views the tweet – which led to his inclusion in a Twitter TV ad campaign – as a “huge moment for” NASCAR.

“It was a moment that basically said, ‘We’re here, want to be a part of the social conversation trends,’” Keselowski said. “I think it kind of helped NASCAR understand the value of non-traditional or at least what was at that time, non-traditional marketing. At that time, remember marketing was a billboard, marketing was flyer in the mail to NASCAR.

“That was the huge paradigm shift then that said, ‘This web stuff, this social media stuff, there might be something here.’ And not that there weren’t some people in NASCAR thinking that way. But I don’t think they had a lot of traction until then.”

In 2022, in addition to his regular Twitter game, Keselowski has an official presence on Facebook, in addition to updates on LinkedIn.

But he hasn’t joined Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Ryan Vargas (who was sponsored by it) who have joined platforms like TikTok.

So don’t go asking Keselowski for tips on the next big social media platform.

“I don’t see any super exciting trends,” Keselowski said. “Twitter was a major breakthrough. I don’t see any breakthroughs similar to it on the horizon. If I did, I would be working on it because it would mean a lot of money to me.”

Oh, almost forgot. Matt Kenseth won the 2012 Daytona 500.