Before Brad Keselowski ran off and won the 2012 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship, he ran off with the victory at Kentucky Speedway.
The win, at the time the third of his season, helped catapult him into the Chase as he was sitting 10th in points at the time. Now, a year later he finds himself in a similar position, ninth, entering a weekend in which he’ll run all three [Truck, Nationwide and Sprint Cup] races. While some in the garage are beginning to feel the heat of both the summer and pressure of making the Chase, Keselowski says he’s focused on the task at hand.
“This is a key time not just for my team, but for all the teams. There’s only a few that I would really consider locked into the Chase,” said the defending race winner on Thursday at Kentucky about the upcoming schedule.
“Realistically if you have two or three wins you’re in a pretty good spot. We don’t have those but we have had solid runs where we’ve been close to winning and a lot of coulda, shoulda, woulda but those don’t count for anything.”
The ‘Race for the Chase’ starts this weekend in Kentucky, giving teams just 10 more weeks to make the postseason. As the defending champion, Keselowski expected more from he and his team at this point in the season. Winless, yet having come close such as the Daytona 500 and Bristol, two races that stick out for Keselowski, which he felt he could have won had cautions and other circumstances fallen his way.
Instead he began to slide through the standings, right around the time his team found themselves in a continued battle with NASCAR. Beginning with a failed inspection at Texas in April, resulting in NASCAR taking away 25 points and suspensions for key players of his team, including crew chief Paul Wolfe.
Keselowski lashed out at NASCAR feeling that his team was being targeted, which was then followed by his car being picked for random inspection. Then another failed inspection [Dover] that resulted in the loss of more points. Now, with the team back in the full swing of things, Kentucky is the perfect place to get their season rolling, plus Keselowski feels he has the most experience at the speedway and wants to add to his continued success there.
“Now it’s our time to really shine and I think thankfully, if you look at the tradition of my team if you could say there is one, over the last two seasons is that we really seem to hit our mark about this time of season and I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” he said.
The summer months have been kind to Keselowski as he alluded to. He’s won at three of the upcoming tracks, including Kentucky this weekend and was apart of one of the most memorable finishes in Watkins Glen history a year ago but finished second. And while he’s not yet out of Chase contention or even on the outside trying to climb in, the team is fighting as if they are. Going for wins and those valuable bonus points, which he expects to begin racking up on Saturday night coming from the eighth starting spot.
“Kentucky Speedway really fits my style, there’s a couple of unique characteristics about it and that’s why I really picked this weekend to run all three [races] because I felt like here and Bristol are probably two of my best tracks and we need to capitalize on that,” Keselowski noted.
“Certainly on the Cup side, have another strong run and hopefully come away with the race win which I think we have a very strong shot at.”
