Ford Racing Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Ford Racing Media Zoom Call
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Brad Keselowski, driver of the No. 6 RFK Racing Ford Mustang Dark Horse, has three NASCAR Cup Series victories at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, including a weekend sweep in 2014 after also winning the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race. Keselowski spoke about going back there as part of this week’s Ford Racing media call.
BRAD KESELOWSKI, No. 6 RFK Racing Ford Mustang Dark Horse – CAN YOU TALK ABOUT LAS VEGAS THIS WEEKEND AND HOW HARD IT IS FOR DRIVERS TO MANEUVER AROUND THE VEGAS TRACK? “First off, Vegas takes so much precision. That’s probably the first thing I think about when I think about that racetrack. You have to really hit your marks. Most of the short tracks it’s really important that you hit a lane that’s like within a foot or so in order to be fast, but with most of the bigger tracks that’s not always the case – they give you a little more of a cushion I guess you could say where you still need to be within an area, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be as small of an area. I think what stands out to me about Vegas is that it’s a very, very fast track with a very narrow spot that you can run on it because of the bumps and the character that the track has, so you have to be really precise at a fast track. If you’re not precise, then the track will really spit you out. I mean that quite literally. One and two, huge bumps over the tunnel and then three and four has got like some ripples in it, so you just have to be really, really precise with how you drive the car. Vegas is a track that just feels very, very fast in the Next Gen car. We won’t have the straightaway speeds that we had with the Gen 6 car, but what makes the Next Gen car hard to drive is it hates rough racetracks. Vegas and Charlotte are two of the roughest racetracks we have that are of the mile-and-a-half variety. It just makes it feel faster because every time you hit one of those bumps it’s just so out of control and on the edge, so the precision that you have to have there is really high and it’s just a gutsy racetrack. When you make a mistake, you can stick in the fence pretty easily.”
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET READY FOR EACH WEEK WHILE YOU CONTINUE TO RECOVER FROM THIS BROKEN LEG? “A lot of PT (physical therapy). I’ve got some great people around me. I actually just came from there to here. That’s why it took me a minute to get on the call. I’m just jamming in all the PT work with some of the best professionals you could hope to work with and I’m building stronger every week, but not as fast as I want to. Driving the race car is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it provides the motivation for me to really push my rehab and do things faster than normal, which is not a bad thing. But it’s a curse because, yes, when I get in the car it does hurt, it does pull me backwards. When I have the adrenaline and all those things, I don’t really notice it, but when it wears off, yeah, I’ve got to recover from that. The long airplane flights to the west coast and the crash on Saturday were not my friends, so I’ll spend most of this week trying to get back to where I was before I left for Phoenix and hopefully by Thursday or Friday before I leave for Vegas, I’ll be ahead of where I was last week and that’s kind of what my weeks have looked like. That’s just my world for hopefully only a few more months, but a reality nonetheless and I’m trying to make it all happen.”
WAS RFK HESITANT TO TAKE PART IN THE FIRST SEASON OF FULL SPEED, AND WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO DO IT THIS TIME, ESPECIALLY AS YOU’RE RECOVERING FROM SUCH A BRUTAL INJURY? “I don’t really know if I’d say we were hesitant. I would say the whole industry was hesitant. I don’t know if I would say RFK was more or less hesitant than anyone else, but there’s a vulnerability to being recorded all that time and there are moments that we all have our unflattering moments and nobody really wants to air their own dirty laundry, and there’s a balance in that. I think it’s just getting comfortable with the camera people and even more so the production team. Yes, we want it to be real. We want to share the good moments that are fun for our fans, but we don’t want to embarrass ourselves either and there’s a balance between those two that I think you try to walk. I think the industry is more confident that we’re able to do that now than probably it was a few years ago, and that’s from some of the relationships that have been developed. It’s interesting because a lot of conversation has been about Netflix and the F1 show, and I sense probably the opposite out of them. Like today, they probably entered with their eyes open and trusting and probably got burned a little bit on a few things here and there and now they’re kind of like, ‘Yeah, I don’t really want to participate anymore.’ So, those things come and go. Right now, it’s in a really good spot. Amazon has done a phenomenal job of showcasing the sport in a positive light while still being true. They deserve a lot of credit for that.”
HOW DIFFERENT ARE YOU EXPECTING THE DARLINGTON RACE TO BE WITH SOME OF THE CHANGES THAT HAVE TAKEN PLACE? “My eyes are wide open. The biggest thing I’m thinking about at Darlington is to go 50 laps on a set of tires was almost impossible with the Next Gen car in the last two or three seasons, and now that we have more horsepower and less aero, I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to go 35 laps. So, keeping up with the tires is going to be a big challenge. The drivers managing it, the teams putting our setups to where it can do it. Darlington is going to be a heavy lift. It’s always a heavy lift, but it’s a heavier lift now, I think, with these circumstances and a lot of unknowns entering the race at Darlington. It might turn out no different, but I don’t think that will be the case. I think it’s gonna be a really difficult race.”
HOW MUCH MOVEMENT DO YOU EXPECT IN THE POINTS AND AFTER MAYBE CHARLOTTE IS THERE AN AREA WHERE YOU FEEL LIKE YOU WOULD BE COMFORTABLE AS FAR AS RECOVERING FROM A POINTS DEFICIT TO MAKE THE CHASE? “I think over the years my experience has said that there are really three seasons. There’s the first third, the second third and the last third that make up the Cup Series. Last year, I would tell you that the first third of the season for me was so bad. I mean, it was ridiculously bad and then we got into a rhythm in the center of the season and had an OK finish to the season, and we had a couple of moments where it looked like we might make the playoffs. Chase’s (Briscoe) team last year, the last third of the year I would argue was probably the best team in the Cup Series. They’ve had a terrible start to the season. The question is, how strong are they gonna rebound? They have the potential to climb up into the top 16, I think, pretty easily, but by the same token having the start that they’ve had to the year probably eliminates them from climbing into the top four or five. It’ll be interesting to see how Chase handles that and how that team handles that because that’s a lot of pressure and a lot of disappointment that I’ve lived, too. It’s an adjustment for sure.”
AS FAR AS YOUR LEG. ARE YOU GOING TO NEED ANY ADDITIONAL SURGERIES OR IS THAT STILL TO BE DETERMINED? HAVE THEY NOTICED ANYTHING AFTER 4-5 RACES THAT THEY LIKE OR DISLIKE? “I keep having x-rays. I’m trying not to be over-the-top about it, but I’ve got a lot of hardware in my leg that’s holding it together and if that hardware were to come loose it would be problematic for me at this time. The surgeon’s and everybody that did it did such an incredible job that that hasn’t been the case. I’m knocking on the wood right here that it stays that way and I’ll keep checking.”
IS THERE ANY POSSIBILITY THAT RFK WOULD WANT TO FIELD A TEAM IN THE O’REILLY AUTO PARTS SERIES? “I have interest in the O’Reilly Series, but as long as it’s an addition to what we’re doing in Cup and not taking away from what we’re doing in Cup. That’s really code for we need to raise a lot of money. To do the O’Reilly Series in a way that would be additive to our Cup Series efforts and not subtract from it, we would need to raise about $15-20 million. That check hasn’t come across our desk. Maybe one day it will, but it hasn’t. Our focus right now is on the Cup cars because we don’t want to take away from it. I don’t want to speak too much for Ford and where their place is in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, but certainly I think you’re right that there are only a handful of Fords in the series.”
YOU TALKED ABOUT THE PACT THE DRIVERS MADE WITH GOODYEAR ABOUT NOT CRITICIZING THE TIRES IF THEY MADE THEM WEAR MORE. CAN YOU SPEAK MORE ABOUT THAT? “There’s a lot more to it other than I guess I’d back up and say when I got into racing at the Cup Series level, there were a lot of things I didn’t understand – not that I understand it all now – but some of the relationships didn’t really make sense to me. Over time, some of them have started to like, ‘Oh, I get why this works the way it does, or I get why that works the way it does.’ And from the outside the Goodyear relationship with NASCAR is one of those that you don’t really understand it and work within it. It doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense. We ask a lot of Goodyear for our sport. They are a key stakeholder from just the ability for us to race by providing the tires to the quality of racing we put on. You go back to when COVID happened, Goodyear had to make a lot of tough decisions just to keep this sport rolling and they did. They were probably our single point of failure that without a few calls and a lot of help, we wouldn’t have been racing during COVID. They deserve a lot of credit for that, but then I guess getting deeper into the comments I was making I think a lot of the drivers and teams have felt very strongly that in order to get the NASCAR Next Gen car to put on the quality of racing we’d like for our fans, that we needed Goodyear to kind of take one for the team and, in this case, that means building a tire that is very close to the failure point, knowing that the teams would over step it, but that it would create a level of racing that was endearing for our fans and partners and key stakeholders. So, Goodyear, as you can imagine, was pretty reluctant to do that. I would be too. I think most of us would be, but they sucked it up and said, ‘OK, we’ll give it a shot, but just, please, help us out. Don’t make us the bad guy on your bad day for something that you asked for.’ And I think the drivers said that actually seems pretty fair, and I’m really proud of the drivers that have had tire issues over the last year or two. They’ve had the wherewithal to say, ‘Hey, look, this is what I asked for. This is what is best for the sport. It might not have worked out for me today. In fact, it worked against me today, but it’s better for us all in the long run.’ I think that’s what this sport should be, is that level of professionalism.”
HOW MUCH FUN WAS IT DOING THE DALE JR. DOWNLOAD FOR SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T DO A LOT OF PODCASTS? COULD WE SEE YOU HOSTING ONE IN THE YEARS AHEAD? “You never say never. It was fun. It was something different. It’s nice to get out of your routine. T.J. and Dirty Mo Media have been asking me for a while to do different things and I’ve kind of pushed it off for a number of reasons. I’ve got a lot going on in my life with family and team ownership and different businesses, but for where I’m at now I don’t want to divert any more attention than I have to away from those things, but you never know where life will take you long term. A lot of things can happen, but I’m glad that people enjoyed it. I’m telling everybody that I do one a year and I did it, so stop asking. That was it. That was my one. We’ll see if I can actually do two now, but I’m glad people liked it.”
YOUR TEAM IS SO CLOSE TO WINNING BETWEEN THE THREE OF YOU. DO YOU FEEL LIKE THE GROUP IS PRESSING AT ALL OR DO YOU FEEL YOU’RE ON PACE AND EVENTUALLY YOU’RE GOING TO GET THERE? “That’s what we want. We want a breakout. My goal for the year is for RFK to win five races. We need more speed to do that. I like the execution we have. I think all three teams have run really smart races. I’m really proud of them. I’m proud that our cars are not falling apart. Mechanically, they’re sound. We’ve got some great mechanics and great work going on. Our pit stops have been, across all three teams, really strong and very high level. If we can just find some pace. We need to find and need a little bit of pace. Ryan Blaney and the 12 car, I think, is the fastest Ford on pretty much a weekly basis and they just have a lot of pace. We have everything but that. I like the moves the drivers are making. Even when I just remove myself, I like the moves that Chris and Ryan are making. I like the pit stops. I like how the cars stay together. I like the strategy. We just need pace. If we can develop a little bit of pace, we can be a very dangerous team – our company, our organization across all three teams.”
WILL YOUR POSITION IN THE STANDINGS NOW CHANGE HOW AGGRESSIVE YOU’RE WILLING TO BE IN PLACES LIKE VEGAS? “I don’t think so. We’re just kind of steady-eddy with all three of our cars, where we are like 10th to 15th I think in almost every race with all three of our cars, minus a wreck in Daytona at the end there for Preece. So, really just kind of steady as an organization. I don’t really see us being able to do anything huge on the strategy side. It’s kind of like I was just saying. We’re just looking for a little bit of pace, and I don’t feel like we really need to be more aggressive because the pace isn’t there for that to really pay off. I think we need to be more aggressive with finding pace, but I’m really happy with everything else.”
DO YOU THINK THE DRIVERS WHO HAVE RACED IN THE CHASE FORMAT BEFORE THIS YEAR HAVE ANY KIND OF ADVANTAGE OVER THOSE WHO HAVEN’T? “I always feel like the field goes through an adjustment period whenever there is a format change or any significant change of like, ‘Hey, how does this actually work?’ And, certainly, I think that’s the case right now and that will probably take until probably the 2027 season for everybody to get back the rhythm of understanding the format and what it values, so having the experience that I think I was able to get that a little faster.”
CAN YOU REFLECT ON WHAT THE TIME AT TEAM PENSKE MEANT TO YOU NOW THAT THEY’RE CELEBRATING THEIR 60TH ANNIVERSARY? “I was really blessed to have the opportunity to drive for Roger Penske, a great chapter in my career. We did a lot of really cool things together. Winning the championships in both the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and the Cup Series was just highlights of my career. I look back really fondly on most of it. Of course, there are always some bumps in the road along the way, but that’s anywhere you’re gonna be, and my legacy no matter what I’m able to do at RFK will always in some ways be attached to Penske and I’m OK with that. I respect the things that they’re doing and the success that they’re having.”
DID ROGER GIVE YOU A MASTERCLASS IN WHAT TEAM OWNERSHIP SHOULD LOOK LIKE? “Among other things. Roger’s work ethic. His class as a whole is very elite and I was proud to be associated with that.”
