Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Atlanta 2 Media Availability
Friday, June 27, 2025
Brad Keselowski, driver of the No. 6 Consumer Cellular Ford Mustang Dark Horse, got the first win for Mustang in the NASCAR Cup Series when he won here at EchoPark Speedway on Feb. 24, 2019. Keselowski stopped by the infield media center before qualifying to talk about tomorrow night’s race.
BRAD KESELOWSKI, No. 6 Consumer Cellular Ford Mustang Dark Horse – YOU’VE HAD ALL THREE RFK DRIVERS FINISH IN THE TOP 10 A COUPLE OF TIMES IN THE LAST MONTH. ARE YOU GUYS GONNA JET FROM HERE? “It’s a good thing. We’ve had some really strong races where you don’t get the results and it’s kind of frustrating, but we’re on a good path. We want wins. Strong showings like that are great and you’d like to think that we’re paying some dues in order to get the wins that we really need, but they’re not wins. I’m very optimistic that we can turn that into something with the weeks we have in front of us, but until then it doesn’t matter. With the way this format is we don’t get any bonus for top 10s. It’s all about the wins, but still it’s not a bad problem to have. A lot of reasons for optimism. All three teams have shown some bright spots. I think that the 17 car, Chris Buescher, qualifying really well, racing really well. That team is very mature. It’s got mature people across the board, pit crew and crew chiefs and drivers and they’re clicking off really strong runs, but just a tiny bit short of getting that win. The 60 car has really grown well together. Last year, we put that team together and ran a partial schedule with Derrick Finley and we had a handful of different drivers and matured a lot of that team and a partial schedule, whether it be pit crew as well, and that team has fired off with putting Ryan in as the driver full-time and shown a lot of strength. We’re probably not where we want to be with my car, the 6 team. I had a slow start to the season, but starting to find a rhythm of our own here over the last month with good runs in the Coke 600, good run at Michigan, good run at Pocono, so I think three of the last five races we’ve been a contender to run up front and compete for the win, but ultimately we haven’t punched through with any of the three cars and I’m eager to do just that.”
DO YOU PUT ANY NEW PROCEDURES IN PLACE TO AVOID THE PENALTY YOU GOT FOR PITTING TOO SOON LAST WEEK? “No, probably just better communication and working through how we missed it. It was kind of a system of redundancy errors, which is not fun, but it happened. We’ll try to be better for it and move on. I don’t know if there’s any glorified procedure to fix to it. That might be a better question for Jeremy Bullins and my spotter, TJ, but it certainly wasn’t an ideal situation.”
WITH T.J. PUCHYR SAYING HE IS GOING TO BUY RICK WARE RACING AND KEEP BOTH CHARTERS AFTER 2026, DOES THAT MAKE YOUR ABILITY TO BE A THREE-CHARTER TEAM MORE DIFFICULT AFTER 2026? “To be determined. As a company, we have to sit down and go through our strategy and what we want to do there. I think it’s pretty well publicly known that we have the first right of refusal on all those deals, so we have to decide where we want to go.”
YOU’RE RACING AT NIGHT, SO IS IT HARDER TO QUALIFY DURING THE DAY? IS A DIFFERENT SETUP REQUIRED? “This track is just super hard to predict. I think here yesterday it was almost 100 degrees and pretty slick. It cools off a little in the night as the sun sets, but it’s still pretty hot. Today, it’s cooled off a bunch. You can stand outside and feel like you could live out there for an hour or two at least, whereas yesterday not so much. So a lot goes into it. When the sun will set during the race, probably halfway-ish I’m guessing from the information I have, but when it does set, the track should gain a lot of grip. It’ll be interesting to me to see the track has sat through another half of a summer. You can really see it turning gray. I had to remind myself on the track walk today that it’s been three years since it’s been repaved because if you actually walk it, it looks like it’s been 10-15 years. It’s seen a lot of degradation. It’s got a lot of different character spots in it that it didn’t have before. It reminds me a little bit of the old Daytona and it’s kind of turning into that type of racetrack. The dynamics of that race are gonna change a lot, just from the track, but when you throw the weather and then the sunset in it, you’re basically running two or three different races as one.”
DOES ANYTHING CHANGE IN THE DYNAMIC AT RFK WHEN EACH OF THE TEAM’S FATE IS MORE ADVERSARIAL TO ONE ANOTHER THAN NORMAL? “No, I think we entered the season – I don’t want to say protecting against that mindset, but having the foresight that it could be realistic and saying, ‘Hey, we just need to get all three cars to win.’ That’s our goal. That’s our focus and then we’re not thinking that way, but if we get so caught up in racing each other, none of them will make it in, so we’ll try to get all three of them to win.”
YOU CAN BE AGGRESSIVE WITH STRATEGY AT A LOT OF THE RACES LEFT IN THE REGULAR SEASON. WILL YOU BE EVEN MORE AGGRESSIVE WITH WHERE YOU ARE IN THE STANDINGS? “To some degree. The road courses, but even Pocono is that way and I suspect Indy will be that way. I feel like that’s probably my mentality regardless, but it’s interesting because I don’t necessarily think it’s all of our team’s mentality. I think the 17 team has a very good shot of just pointing their way in. They’re very well positioned, but certainly when you look at our season it looks that way with the 6 car, yes.”
HAVE YOU HAD ANY INTERACTION WITH T.J. PUCHYR? “Yeah, I know T.J. T.J. has been in the garage for a while and he called me and gave me a briefing of what was going on there.”
WHEN YOU SAY RIGHT OF FIRST REFUSAL DOES THAT MEAN YOU COULD HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO GET ONE OF THE CHARTERS AFTER THE PURCHASE OF RWR? “There’s always an opportunity. The juice and the squeeze have to line up.”
WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT THE FOURTH OF JULY DURING YOUR CHILDHOOD DAYS? DID THAT MEAN DAYTONA? “No. Actually, it being kind of a Truck Series/ARCA brat, it was Milwaukee. We would usually race the Milwaukee Mile around the Fourth of July weekend. I can remember driving back through Chicago because we lived in Michigan and the fireworks would be going off. I have a lot of great riding in the motorhome stories and the July Fourth race weekends were always some of the best.”
HAS THERE BEEN ANY FURTHER CONVERSATION ABOUT THE OTHER DECISION TO STAY OUT ONE LAP LATER AND THEN THE CAUTION CAME OUT? “No. We’ve been really busy, a lot of focus. We were testing at Gateway the last two days and I would say all of our energy has been consumed by just trying to be fast. The opportunities and the different things that happen through the year, particularly around pit strategy, are very lotteryesque and your best way to take advantage of those situations is just to be fast, so I think our energy and time is focused on what do we need to do to show the pace that we’ve shown, whether that be at Michigan or Pocono or a handful of other races like Charlotte. How do we get that pace at more races that will put us in a position to where some of those things when they fall your way you’re able to capitalize.”
WHEN YOU GET BIT BY A CAUTION LIKE THAT CAN IT MAKE THE TEAM GUN SHY ABOUT THOSE DECISIONS TO RUN LONG? “It’s like the age old blackjack story where you sit down at the table and you don’t hit on 16 and the next card that comes up was a 4 and you lose and you’re like, ‘Wow, that was pretty dumb.’ And so your tendency the next time is, ‘let’s hit,’ and then you get a face card and you bust. It’s kind of like you pick a path and you stick to the path. When you flip-flop back and forth on the path, I’ve always believed that’s when you make a mistake because a lot of those shots are 50/50 shots and they come back and that’s what I meant. You’ve just got to make sure that when it does go your way you’re fast enough to make it count and it didn’t go our way at Pocono. We were good enough to make it count if it did and that’s just the breaks.”
AS A DRIVER, HOW MUCH EMPHASIS AND FOCUS ARE YOU PUTTING IN THE CHALLENGE AND DO YOU FEEL YOUR MENTALITY TOMORROW MAY CHANGE LATE IN THE RACE. AS A TEAM OWNER, HAVE YOU TOLD CHRIS AND RYAN TO PUT MORE OR LESS EMPHASIS ON IT? “The only thing I told them as a team owner is to make sure we all shared if we won, and they said yes, but we didn’t say exactly what that meant. I agreed to share if I won with the team and they at least nodded that they would do the same. I probably should have outlined that a little better. We have a few more weeks to figure that out, but I think as a whole some of the drivers have been kind of dismissive over the bracket challenge, which always feels like the ‘don’t take a picture with the trophy’ type of thing where you’re like, ‘I don’t want to talk about it because I don’t want to be thinking about it.’ But I think it will become a lot more real, whether it be for the drivers or for the media or for the fans as it progresses into the later rounds of the next few weeks. I look at the races ahead of us, for example this weekend, and it’s like the field is so big right now that it’s like, ‘I don’t really know what to say.’ It’s too much, but I’m hopeful that all three of our cars will make it through the next couple rounds and then it will certainly become more of a focal point for us.”
DID YOU TALK TO KYLE BUSCH AT ALL ABOUT YOUR MATCHUP? “No, I haven’t talked to him at all. I don’t know if he’s here. He’s not here. He didn’t show up. Showing up is half the battle. I’m sure there will be some great matchups along the way and some shocking losses.”
