Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Goodyear 400 Media Availability — Darlington Raceway
Saturday, April 5, 2025
Brad Keselowski, driver of the No. 6 Castrol Seven Critical Areas Ford Mustang Dark Horse for RFK Racing, has two career NASCAR Cup Series wins at Darlington Raceway. The owner/driver stopped by the infield media center before practice and qualifying to talk about this weekend’s race.
BRAD KESELOWSKI, No. 6 Castrol Seven Critical Areas Ford Mustang Dark Horse – TARIFFS ARE IN THE NEWS. FROM A TEAM OWNERS PERSPECTIVE IS THIS CONCERNING AND HOW ARE YOU LOOKING AT THIS? “I can’t say I’ve put a ton of thought into it, but a lot of our single source parts come from here in the United States. I don’t know a lot of them that don’t, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not affected, whether that be raw materials or so forth, but at this point in time I don’t see there being a drastic effect for us, but I don’t know what I don’t know.”
WHEN YOU LOOK AT THIS SCENARIO DO YOU FEEL IT COULD BE AN ISSUE FROM AN OEM OR SPONSOR PERSPECTIVE? “It’s hard to say what kind of lagging indicators are out there, but, generally speaking, in the short term everybody has contracts and commitments and all those things. Long term, I can’t really answer much. I know that we’re in a good spot with all of our sponsors and deals that we have. I feel like you’re never immune, but we’re positioned well.”
NONE OF THE RFK CARS ARE RUNNING THROWBACK SCHEMES THIS WEEKEND. HOW HAS THE CALCULUS SHIFTED TO RUN YOUR TRADITIONAL SCHEME VERSUS THE THROWBACK? “It’s just hard. It’s hard to get all the different people to line up to pull it off. For my car this weekend, we have Castrol on it. We did throwbacks the last few times here. It’s kind of like we ran out of a little bit of energy to pull off one that was good enough to make a mark, so to speak. The other thing is, at least for us, is we have global brands on our cars and they have global initiatives and things that are going on and they want to make sure they hit those, so with limited windows to do that it doesn’t always work out. I think from a body of work on the throwback stuff we’ve done a lot and I’m really proud of what we’ve done. Maybe this year wasn’t obviously our greatest for making that happen, but I suspect that will come back around in the years to come.”
IS THE WEEKEND AS A WHOLE STILL WORTH DOING? “I think so. It’s difficult to get all the parties to join in and to participate, but year over year it seems like it has its ebbs and flows, where you have partners who are super excited about it and then the next year you have partners who are kind of just kind of ‘eh’. Ultimately, we need to make them happy.”
HAS THERE BEEN A SPECIFIC STRUGGLE WITH THE 6 TEAM THAT IS HAMPERING YOU GUYS AND DOES THE SPEED OF THE OTHER TWO CARS GIVE YOU OPTIMISM YOU CAN RIGHT THE SHIP? “Yeah, I feel like we’re gonna do all the right things and get where we need to be. 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.”
HOW HAS THE TRANSITION BEEN FOR JEREMY? “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. 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.”
DO YOU KNOW WHAT TO FIX AND DO YOU FEEL YOU CAN GET CLOSE TO WINNING, OR DO YOU FEEL YOU CAN STILL POINT YOUR WAY IN? “We can definitely still point our way in, but we just don’t want to. 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.”
WHAT MIGHT BE THE IMPACT OF THE RICK WARE LEGAL SITUATION AT THIS POINT ON YOU GUYS? “It’s too early to tell. 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.”
STEVE PHELPS TALKED ABOUT THE OWNER’S ADVISORY GROUP WITH YOU, HEATHER AND JUSTIN. WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THINGS YOU COULD POTENTIALLY ACCOMPLISH AND HOW MUCH HAVE YOU BEEN AROUND THOSE TWO? “I’ve got a lot of respect for both Heather and Justin, so I’ll answer that part first. Justin is really an outside the box thinker and kind of runs in a different pack, which I appreciate. He brings viewpoints that maybe I wouldn’t have thought of. I can say that. I think that’s good, and Heather, she’s got her family name in this sport. She’s clearly very invested and has a son running in the sport and has a passion for it that I respect and appreciate as well. Altogether, it’s hard to pick one initiative that’s important. There are a lot of important initiatives. If there are two that stand out to me it’s the end of the season and how we continue to make it the best we can for our fans, whether it be the racetracks we go to or the schedule as a whole with respect to when the season ends and when it starts. I think that’s something that I’m really keen to try to bend a few ears on and the group as a whole, and, beyond that, I think what stands out a lot is just the garage personnel and relationships and culture that we have in trying to solidify it as a place to work, whether it be for team members or officials or what not and trying to make it the best place we can. Those two have probably taken the priority for me.”
THERE’S TALK OF THE NFL EXPANDING TO 18 GAMES THE SUPER BOWL MOVING. THAT COULD MAYBE CHANGE SOME THINGS FOR NASCAR AND WHEN THE SEASON STARTS. “Without getting in front of our skis here and everything that is somewhat a proprietary issue to discuss, but I think you’re on the right path. The world is changing around us and we have to continue to adapt to that, whether it be the Super Bowl moving or different opportunities that exist with our broadcast partners that didn’t exist before and just trying to maximize those opportunities and adapt to the world.”
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE CURRENT PACKAGE FOR BRISTOL? “The big guessing game is the tires. We went there last spring and the tires didn’t hold up very well. The dynamics of the race shifted fairly drastically and then we came back in the fall and the tires didn’t wear at all. That was another shift in the dynamics of the race, so trying to understand which one of those is going to be the case is probably the biggest question mark.”
WHAT DO YOU HAVE PLANNED FOR THE OFF WEEK? “A nice Easter celebration with my kids. We haven’t figured out exactly where, but we’re gonna have a good time.”
WHAT DOES THE ADDITION OF PREECE MEAN FOR RFK AND WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN OUT OF HIM? “I think Ryan is doing all the things he needs to do, whether that be on the track with results that are clear to see, or off the track with a lot of things that you don’t see and whether that’s different settings of meetings or his work ethic as a whole has been very high and we’re just trying to make sure that he’s surrounded with the right things to go with his work ethic that they can become potential advantages for him on the racetrack. He’s certainly putting in the effort. He’s highly focused and highly motivated and it’s nice to see him get the results out of that.”
A LOT OF THE PROBLEM WITH THROWBACK SCHEMES IS THAT THEY’RE TRADEMARKED. HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO GET SOME OF THESE PAINT SCHEMES? “It’s a big lift, without a doubt, for the marketing and partnership teams that are inside all of these organizations to make it happen. There are a lot of conversations and it takes months of planning, maybe even years of planning in some cases to execute. I was having this conversation with Kevin Harvick a few weeks ago when we were talking about when he ran the 29 during the All-Star Race. I know that’s not this, but it’s calls with partners, it’s calls with trademarks and you kind of get to the point where you’re like, ‘I just want to go race.’ But when you do get the project done and you see it on the track or you hear from the fans, whether it be social media or wherever else it might be, when you’ve hit a good one, it’s definitely worth it.”
HAVE YOU EMBRACED AI AT ALL? “I think NASCAR has been pretty heavy in AI for a long time, it just maybe isn’t branded that way. If you took it to the AI world, they would clearly say it is. I think that for no small part of the last decade plus the use of AI and how the race cars are put together and how they’re set up has been gradually becoming more and more of a dominant force in the results that you see on any given weekend – to the point now where, particularly with the Next Gen car, where the race is more and more driven by how you bolt it together rather than component development. Using any type of artificial intelligence, I mean it moves the needle for us and we’re gonna continue to double down on that. We’re seeing more and more interest from AI partners in the sport and I suspect that it’s gonna be a big storyline for our sport for decades to come. It’s kind of like if you go back through the late 80s or early 90s when aerodynamics really came into NASCAR in a really heavy way. You don’t unlearn those things and now I look at artificial intelligence and what NASCAR is doing with it and the teams don’t really talk about it, particularly not publicly. They talk about it a lot within in the OEM circles. They talk about it a lot in the hiring practices in those types of settings, but particularly not within the media does NASCAR really talk about at the team level the importance of AI, but I can tell you every team on the track today is using some level of AI just to purely compete and the ones with the better tools are going to run better.”
YOU VISITED A LOCAL HOSPITAL EARLIER THIS WEEK. HOW DO YOU LIKE GETTING OUT IN THE COMMUNITIES AROUND THE TRACKS, AND WHEN YOU SEE KIDS OR ADULTS FIGHTING FOR YOUR HEALTH DOES IT GIVE YOU AN EXTRA FIRE TO PERFORM WELL? “It’s certainly a reminder of how fortunate we are when you have those opportunities to go to hospitals and see people who aren’t as well off. We get so caught up in our good weekends and our bad weekends and sometimes lose sight of the broader picture of just how fortunate we are just to be here. We probably wouldn’t be very good competitors if we just felt fortunate to be here though, so it’s probably pretty natural. To your point, it’s nice to get out in the community to see our fans, to tell our story. Big credit to NASCAR and their vision for the DAP program. I think it’s really moving the needle and inspiring a lot of people to do things that they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Being more involved in the community, I don’t want to take all the credit. Look at what the other drivers are doing. They’re doing as much or more, and I think you’re seeing that because of NASCAR’s commitment back to the drivers. It’s a great time in the sport. We spend a lot of time talking about what the sport doesn’t get right and very little time talking about what the sport does get right, and I think the drivers being involved in the community and engaging back with our fans is one of the things NASCAR does very well.”
