Yahoo Autos ‘Raw speed’ the missing piece in Keselowski’s quest for victory
Brad Keselowski continues to believe his RFK Racing team is one step away from returning to NASCAR Cup series victory lane.
“Just need a little bit more raw speed,” Keselowski said. “We need to show up at racetracks and be a threat for the pole, run the fastest lap in the race. Do those types of things. We’ve done that … at Bristol, we haven’t done that enough at other places. That’s what we’re looking for.”
Keselowski’s winless streak is now 103 races old, dating back to the spring of 2021 at Talladega Superspeedway. The victory was his last with Team Penske before joining forces with Jack Roush as driver and co-owner. Keselowski has yet to win driving the No. 6 Ford Mustang Dark Horse, but he’s been to victory lane four times as co-owner of Chris Buescher’s No. 17.
Entering the first road course race of the season at Circuit of the Americas (Sunday, 3:30 p.m. ET, Fox), Keselowski, who has not yet won on a road course in the Cup Series, is 13th in the championship standings and Buescher is 14th. Buescher has three top-10 finishes to Keselowski’s pair.
“I thought at Phoenix our teams looked really similar,” Keselowski said of the gap between the two teams. “Atlanta, we looked pretty similar. Daytona, we looked pretty similar. We didn’t look very similar at Las Vegas; I thought the 17 was stronger than the 6 car was there.
“Those things come and go for various reasons, there’s not one thing on any given week. You want the crew chiefs to have a little bit of freedom to do what they want to do with their engineers and try different things, and when that gets too far apart for too long, you try to rein it back in, and there’s an ebb and flow to that. But for the most part, I feel like we’re pretty close.”
The winless streak is not something Keselowski has concerned himself with as he’s worked to integrate himself and help carry RFK Racing forward. But Keselowski also doesn’t mind being asked how close he feels to winning or what the team is missing.
“No, no, no,” he said. “It’s the right question to ask. It’s the question we ask of ourselves.”
Fortunately, Keselowski and his group is much closer to making that happen than they were in their first year together.
“Oh yeah, we’re way closer than we were 24 months ago,” Keselowski said. “But that’s not good enough.”
