Ten months ago Brad Keselowski wasn’t particularly happy about not being able to defend his Nationwide Series championship.
[media-credit name=”Credit: By Chris Graythen, Getty Images” align=”alignright” width=”245″]
[/media-credit]NASCAR had announced they were changing the point system as well as who would be eligible for the championship and Sprint Cup Series drivers would not be among that group. Keselowski and the likes of Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards would not even earn points in 2011. Instead only NNS regulars would contend for the championship and on Saturday night in Homestead Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was passed the torch from Keselowski.
“It’s been kind of an up-and-down year on all sides,” said Keselowski, “whether Cup or Nationwide side, and it certainly feels good to finish this year off very strong with a win and sitting on the pole today.”
While Stenhouse celebrated his first NNS title, Keselowski celebrated his fifth win of the season, 17th of his career and first at Homestead. It comes in a season that saw Sprint Cup drivers continue to dominate the series as drivers like Stenhouse earned the spotlight through a great points battle.
For the No. 22 Discount Tire Dodge team and Keselowski though, they started off on a rough note. Whereas everything seem to go their way in 2010 when they won the title, they couldn’t buy luck the first half of this year. It wasn’t until Kentucky in July when Keselowski scored his first win in a fuel mileage race.
From there the team caught fire and all five of their wins came on different tracks. The sting of not being able to win the championship was relieved as Keselowski made sure they still contended for race wins and put the sponsors in the headlines.
Capping it off by going out on top in the season finale was a big accomplishment for Keselowski. The team started the season as the defending champion and will leave it as the last winner, heading into the offseason with their heads held high. Keselowski will again run a limited schedule in 2012.
“It was really neat,” said Keselowski of winning the race while passing the championship to Stenhouse. “My spotter was talking about it during the race with Carl [Edwards] being a past Nationwide champion and myself being last year’s and racing with Ricky, it was kind of cool. It’s good to see the sport and the progression that it takes. It’s a good moment to reflect on where the sport is, was and is heading.”
As for the new champion in town, it’s someone that Keselowski couldn’t have picked better himself. Stenhouse Jr. won two races on his way to the title, coming off Rookie of the Year last season, and a tense period when many wondered if he would have a job.
“Man, it’s unbelievable,” said Stenhouse. “There’s a lot of people that’s worked really hard for this. My family, they’ve scarified a lot; Jack Roush, all these guys on our team. They were with us when we were struggling and they never gave up last year and really believed in me.”
Enough cannot be written or said about the journey Stenhouse went through to get to Saturday night. When presenting the NNS championship trophy, NASCAR president Mike Helton said that Missouri native was just what the sport needed. Many around the sport find it hard to disagree and were happy to offer congratulations to the Roush Fenway team.
Keselowski will be the first to say Stenhouse has done some pretty impressive things. He didn’t just luck into the championship because Cup drivers were ineligible. He went out and won races, led laps and constantly gave Keselowski, Edwards, Busch and others a run for their money. Now he’s a champion, a new face atop the sport.
“He’s done a great job picking that up this year and that’s what every driver needs to learn,” said Keselowski who believes that because Roush suffered a bad year in 2010 it led to Stenhouse’s struggles. With their cars better Stenhouse has been able to settle in and doesn’t have to push as hard to get the finishes that he deserved.
“That’s why teams are so important, because the first brick, the foundation of any race team is the speed you have in the car,” Keselowski believes. “From there you put up the sides of the house with the pit crew and you worry about the roof, the roof being the race car driver. But you’ve got to have that good foundation and that’s speed in the car and everything else is built off of that. I think that camp over there did a good job of making their program better, making their cars better and Ricky was able to make something out of that. So he deserved some credit, too.”
Stenhouse took command of the point lead in the summer, shortly after winning his first career race at Iowa. He backed it up with another win again Iowa a few weeks later. The team also encountered races where wins got away, such as when Keselowski raced Stenhouse hard in Indianapolis and stole the win. Stenhouse had led 189 of 204 laps.
Wins may have slipped away but crew chief Mike Kelley kept Stenhouse focused on the big picture. As they started dominating the series, commanding the headlines and finding their confidence, their contenders were beating themselves. Soon it was looking more likely that Stenhouse was going to go from down and out to big star.
“We got the lead a couple of times, lost it, got it a couple times,” said Stenhouse of the point lead. “But the last time we got it we were bound and determined not to give it back. We wanted to seal it up before coming to Homestead. We did the best job we could, and it was just the whole year, just the total team effort, just really working, not making mistakes on pit road, not making mistakes as a driver and as a crew chief. I think at the end of the year, we really limited our mistakes that we made in the first half of the year that gave those points leads back to other people.”
According to Stenhouse, those were the important areas where they focused and it paid off. And coming into a season where many were looking at other drivers at potential champions, he and Kelley knew they had what it takes to replace Keselowski at the head table.
“At the end of last year Mike Kelley and I were sitting down at the banquet watching Brad get the trophy,” he said. “We told each other right there as strong as we were running at the end of the year, running in the top five with the Cup guys, we were going for that championship, and that was before they ever changed the point system.”
The change certainly helped but Stenhouse says, “We felt like as a race team we could do that. I felt like as a driver I was just as good as anybody else out there, and if we put everything together then we knew we had a shot at this championship.”
