The last seven days have been a “whirlwind” for Brad Keselowski and the rest of the folks who call RFK Racing their home.
It started with Chris Buescher winning the team’s first NASCAR Cup Series race in five years in the night race at Bristol Motor Speedway. After a celebration at team’s headquarters in Concord, North Carolina, they then took part in two days of testing at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Then came Saturday at Texas Motor Speedway. Keselowski scored his first Cup pole since 2019 and in the process secured RFK Racing its first season since 2013 with multiple poles.
“It is a super exciting time for me and for our company here at RFK with a lot of the progress we have made over the last few months and now it is actually starting to show up. It has been a painful journey, but a good one,” Keselowski said after earning his 18th career Cup pole. “It is just a lot of things happening in all directions both personally and professionally with this business and my other business and with our foundation. Everything is wide open in every direction. Sometimes it is hard to stop and reflect on how privileged and blessed I am to be in this position, but a good time nonetheless.”
There’s plenty of stats to recite that show RFK Racing is trending upward substantially in 2022 for the first time in almost a decade.
W team, W photo 📸 pic.twitter.com/0Vk3SNlV5M
— RFK Racing (@RFKracing) September 19, 2022
But the last person to ask about that progress is Keselowski, who has seven races left in his first season as a co-owner / driver with the team founded by Jack Roush.
“I am living in my own bubble so I am not sure if it is fair for me to answer that question (about the team experiencing a turning point),” Keselowski said. “I think that is a question better answered by those outside my bubble. It is certainly a lot of progress. In the media center last week at Bristol I think I tried to articulate at least that you do things in this sport and it takes six to 12 months for them to be realized. That is the reality.
“Anything in this sport that you do in one week’s time or two weeks time is probably illegal. The majority of things that come together take months and months of behind-the-scenes work to come together. In that sense, it is super painful. It is really painful. You do things and you don’t get a result and everybody challenges and questions the decisions that were made and you kind of have to stay the course.”
The team stayed the course as both of its cars went winless in the regular season, missed out on the playoffs and after a 100 point and $100,000 penalty against Keselowski’s No. 6 team for an L2-level infraction after the spring race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Keselowski himself has only four top-10 finishes so far, his fewest since 2010 when he had two in his first full-time season with Team Penske.
Keselowski said much of his first year in his new role has been about the conflicting relationship of wearing both a driver hat and an owner’s hat.
“They look at each other and say, ‘not good enough’. The driver side wants the cars better and the car owner side says to get the finish you can get with the equipment you have,” Keselowski said. “That is all easier said than done on both sides. I probably fell victim to pushing too hard and not having the equipment we needed to have at the start of the year and not always getting the finishes we needed to get to just move on.
“It was very much a needing to run 15th to 20th because we had 25th-place cars and that is what we have. I probably fell victim to trying to get too much out of them and making our days worse than what they needed to be but also pushing them in such a way that it was very clear what the boundaries were with our cars and their performance and what we needed to do to make them better. On the owner side I think our people are maturing and our processes are maturing. We have added some great resources in multiple areas. There are a lot of pieces coming together for sure.”
Keselowski says he’s not a good person to ask about RFK’s progress. But if anyone can vouch for how far the team’s come, it’s Texas-native Chris Buescher.
The 29-year-old Buescher is a veteran of 250 NASCAR Cup races and was originally signed as a Roush development driver in 2009. Despite tenures with Front Row Motorsports and JTG Daugherty Racing, Buescher has an intimate knowledge of RFK Racing’s history over the last decade.
Buescher’s Bristol win, just his second Cup victory, snapped a 222-race winless streak (Pocono 2016). But that win came with Front Row Motorsports. Bristol was his first victory with RFK Racing since his 2015 Xfinity Series championship campaign.
“It has been a long time coming and it has been really cool because everybody at RFK has had some struggles through the years and I have been around through the heyday and through the very absolute highs and I have seen the lows along the way as well,” Buescher said. “To be turning that corner to get back to where we are competing for wins again and be able to pull off some wins is really special to myself and to everybody back at the company.
“I have so many friends within the organization that I have known for almost my entire time I have been in North Carolina and that is something that means just a little bit more when you get to see those guys and girls that have really put in so much effort through that amount of time to be able to see some progress. Brad is a champion of our sport and has won I don’t even know how many races. I think it is really special to get it started but we are not done. This isn’t our peak. We have a lot of potential going forward and are going to stay after it.
“We might as well come back to my home track and keep it going right here, right?”