Brad Keselowski unfazed by 101-race winless streak

LAS VEGAS — Brad Keselowski won’t sweat a streak that no one wants reaching triple-digits.

Keselowski saw his winless streak reach 100 races a week ago at Atlanta and it increased to 101 after a 13th-place finish Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

For someone who has won a Cup title (in 2012) and has won his fair share of Cup races (35), hitting the 100-winless mark would seem to feel like another punch in the gut.

But the 40-year-old Keselowski hasn’t seemed too concerned about the streak. He did not win in his final 26 races at Team Penske before leaving the organization after the 2021 season to become a minority owner in struggling Roush Fenway Racing, which has rebranded to RFK Racing.

Keselowski wanted to control his competitive destiny, even if it would take time to lift the performance of RFK to what he had at Team Penske.

So while being 0-for-75 since driving for a team for which he is part of the management team can sting a little bit, the fact he made the playoffs and finished eighth in the standings in 2023 tells him it isn’t all doom and gloom.

And last week at Atlanta with the streak on the brink of 100, Keselowski laughed when it was brought up.

“I’m not paying any attention to it, to be honest,” Keselowski said. “What matters to me? I would rather be fast every week and contending for wins than fall ass-backwards into a race win and say, ‘Oh, the streak is over.’

“I want to be fast. I want to be contending. I want to be in the hunt.”

When previewing the season earlier this year, Keselowski swore that the winless streak doesn’t gnaw at him.

“It really doesn’t,” Keselowski said. “I feel like when I made the move [to RFK], I made the move knowing that those stats and all those things were going to be not pretty, and I made a very conscious decision two or three years ago to throw that aside as not being what’s important to me.”

Keselowski has had eight top-5s and 22 top-10 finishes since joining RFK Racing. He has won one of the Daytona 500 qualifying races, typically known as “the duels.”

But to go his first two full seasons at RFK without a win? One would think that Keselowski wasn’t planning on two winless years when he made the move.

“That’s fair,” Keselowski said. “We have won non-points races, but nobody counts that with the duels. We’ve been in position and that is what is super important to me.”

Keselowski opened 2024 in the hunt at Daytona and Atlanta but accidents ended his day early. He finished a respectable 13th Sunday at Las Vegas but certainly wasn’t contending nor in the hunt.

After the first two races, Keselowski was tied for 33rd in the standings and already 31 points behind the playoff cutoff. Following the Vegas performance, he moved up to 28th in the standings and 28 points behind the cutoff.

Drivers can make the playoffs with a victory no matter where they sit in points. So Keselowski doesn’t necessarily sweat the standings.

“I want to win races, so points don’t really mean anything once you win,” Keselowski said prior to Vegas. “It’s not where I would want to be in points, but I’m in position to win races, and that’s going to pay off eventually.”

With 23 races remaining in the regular season, Keselowski said this is not the time to roll the dice and take chances for a victory to make the playoffs. 

“We’re way too early for that. We just need to do what we can do and go out there and win races and be competitive.”

While the Fords might have wanted an overall stronger performance Sunday in their first race on a 1.5-mile track with their new body — Keselowski was the third-best Ford in 13th — it can take a few races to learn what adjustments work best to gain speed.

Keselowski felt prior to the season that the new body would make his organization stronger. His teammate, Chris Buescher, won three races last year in a breakout season.

“The Ford car is going to be really, really good at every track,” Keselowski said. “The work that has been put in has been exceptional. The Fords were significantly behind last year with aerodynamics of the car and that pushed us to be better in other areas.

“You fix aerodynamics with all the other strengths we’ve built over the last year, I think this is going to be a big year for us.”

A big year would include a win. Does Keselowski know how he would celebrate the end of the streak?

“No, not really,” Keselowski said. “I have a few thoughts but nothing planned.”

Keselowski frankly said that the streak hasn’t increased his will to win. And that’s for a simple reason — he never lost that will.

“I never was not hungry,” Keselowski said. “I don’t know how to get any hungrier.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.

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