DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Brad Keselowski thinks we need to get off this planet.
Or, at a minimum, humans need to find a way to inhabit a second one. And relatively quickly.
He doesn’t say this to create panic but out of concern for the future of the human race and its continuation “beyond our own existence.” He describes it as “true altruism” and says it’s all about perpetuating life on a millennia scale and diversifying where it can exist.
“I don’t think the average American understands how important space is right now,” he says. “If we get space right, it’ll be great for humankind. If we don’t get space right, we’ll pretty much fail to exist in the next few centuries as a species.”
Keselowski — a 38-year-old NASCAR driver and owner with a manufacturing company that focuses primarily on aerospace — sees a shrinking window. He says we need to establish people living on Mars with the moon as a base. He thinks we’ll need a space station with the ability “to 3D print organs and other medical items for humans to survive.” We’ll need to mine asteroids for rare Earth metals. And it all needs to happen within the next century — “maybe sooner.”
He wouldn’t point directly to climate change as the reason behind his theory, despite the abundance of scientific evidence that the planet is slowly dying thanks to human-induced damage, some of which is contributing to an influx of natural disasters. For him, it’s more about the universe’s history where “planets come, planets go.”
“Something’s gonna take down Earth, whether it’s a meteor, whether it’s the sun,” he says. “It’s more likely a volcano than any of those things, but it’s not a climate-driven discussion, although it could be. It’s just inevitable that it will happen.”
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This is the conundrum of Brad Keselowski. He’s one of NASCAR’s most intriguing drivers not simply because he has such obscure outside interests but because he tends to be bold and contrarian, and it is difficult to tell if he does this entirely on purpose or does not realize he’s even doing it.
At this point, it’s probably just a genuine reflection of how his mind actually works.
He refers to himself as a “bit of an enigma” but that’s not exactly precise; anyone who’s asked him a question before knows that even the simplest request can elicit a 10-minute monologue that ranges over multiple topics. It’s more like Keselowski exists to short-circuit preconceived notions — about himself, about racing, about anything.
He insists that reading and research and comprehension of complex data is essential to personal development and professional success, but distrusts academia — which, of course, is the pursuit of knowledge through rigorous study.
He says he’s always all in and never hedges based on the idea that he might fail. He’s turned the end of one project into a new opportunity several times.
He says he never dreamed he’d get this far in racing, 13 full-time seasons at NASCAR’s top level, but in so many ways, his life was always leading him to this point.
This point, he has said, is perhaps the most important year of his career. With a new car debuting in Sunday’s Daytona 500, Keselowski left one of the most stable and well-run teams in all of racing, Team Penske, to help take over and re-energize the 34-year-old Cup Series team, Roush Fenway Racing (now known as Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing, or RFK).
We’ve set high expectations for ourselves, but I think that’s what will make us great. This is just the beginning for @RFKracing. pic.twitter.com/I7qvBxwWlM
— Brad Keselowski (@keselowski) November 17, 2021
He’s not new to ownership but hasn’t been involved at the highest level before, and he’s already embracing progressive ideas about how to win races and run a more modern business. In this way he’s fulfilling the family mission, the big dreams of his father, who passed away in December.
But Bob Keselowski scraped by on grit and gumption and his love of fixing up his car and making it work with whatever he had.
Brad Keselowski has done it his own way, even as he strains, daily, to refine what his own way is.
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Twenty years ago, a teenaged Brad Keselowski could often be found fiddling around on a computer. He admired the work ethic of his father running the family’s NASCAR Truck Series team. But as a gangly kid, he wasn’t usually doing the literal heavy lifting when it came to trying to make the team better. So he’d turn to technology for possible answers.
“‘You’ll never get anywhere in racing on that computer,’” Keselowski recalls his father, Bob, saying. “I knew that was wrong then, and it’s very wrong now.”
His father was a “wrenches guy” who loathed the idea of motor sports trending toward enhanced technology and the digital age. But that sentiment didn’t dissuade Keselowski from pushing forward.
When the family team struggled, he’d think to himself, “Oh God, let me see if I can figure something out.” He studied his father’s team, learned what worked and what didn’t. And when the team ultimately folded, Keselowski, in his early 20s, felt tremendous personal guilt. He wasn’t the one running the team or making all the decisions, but felt he should have done more to keep the team afloat.
“I learned some really tough and critical lessons from that that I was able to apply that made me feel more confident to be a businessman,” he says. “My businesses might fail too. I don’t know. I don’t think they will, but they could. So hopefully, I’m a better businessman.”
My dad will always be my hero. He was quiet and understated, but that didn’t change the impact he had on me or that I watched him have on everyone who knew him. I am forever grateful for what I learned from this man, and I will remember him every day. https://t.co/NiG822YfpD pic.twitter.com/eUZWkPtUEG
— Brad Keselowski (@keselowski) December 22, 2021
That early failure may explain Keselowski’s singular focus on self improvement. He reads everything he can, during flights to races or back home, on slow Saturdays at tracks, when he’s supposed to be on vacation.
All NASCAR drivers are steadfast and intense, but his fervor for gathering information sticks out. All the while, Keselowski strives to be authentic and believes his fans “generally appreciate some of [his] quirkiness.”
“I’m probably a nerd by most people’s definition,” he says. “A successful nerd in the sense that I love to read. I love to study. I love data. I love making good decisions with data and beating people by outsmarting them.”
It makes some sense: Keselowski watched his father work tirelessly to outwork everybody and also saw all the ways it did not succeed.
So often, his father pushed forward with grim determination; after his lone win in the then-fledgling third-tier Truck Series, in 1997, he said, “Boy, I needed this one bad. We are just starting to get all the big haulers and the shop and everything. I don’t want to lose it now. It took me 40-something years to get to this point.”
Bob would fight through physical pain to keep racing before exiting the driver’s seat and focusing on his ownership role. But ultimately it folded.
He died in December, three days before Christmas, at age 70 after being diagnosed with cancer two years ago. Though they didn’t always see eye-to-eye, Keselowski called his father his “hero.”
Keselowski thought he was prepared for his father’s death because he had time to process it, but soon realized he was wrong. He compared it to the expectant parents who read every book and ask every question and are still, inevitably, caught off guard, by actually having a baby to care for.
“You’ll never be ready,” he says.
Keselowski pledged, in the days after his father’s death, to “remember him every day.” And of course he does. How could he not? He is still his father’s son, always searching for a better way.
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Brad Keselowski has already reached heights he never expected.
He didn’t grow up dreaming of winning in the NASCAR Cup Series, the sport’s highest level. He didn’t even dream of racing in it. The youngest of five, his childhood dreams were ambitious but humble, like his upbringing in Rochester Hills, Michigan.
Sure, he comes from a family of racers, but not from money and not from seven-time champions. No mansion, no frills. They drove an old motorhome to races and seldom flew. There was food on the dinner table and a roof over their heads, but the Keselowskis weren’t racing royalty like other NASCAR families.
Sweet photo find
My dad giving me a little assistance during my first driving attempt.
circa 1990Preparing for dad’s funeral Wednesday and things like this make it a little easier. So glad my family found this picture pic.twitter.com/BGEDTfLz3L
— Brad Keselowski (@keselowski) January 2, 2022
And everybody pitched in, in whatever way they could.
“Sometimes, you didn’t want him to hold a wrench; he would hurt himself more often than not,” his brother, Brian Keselowski, jokes. “Sometimes, he was more of the thinker.”
To save money, his dad’s team would only have the trash collected once a month, which meant Brad and Brian were charged with climbing into the dumpster and jumping on the garbage to smash it and make room for more before the pickup.
“We raced and made just enough money to race again,” Keselowski recalls.
His hopes were to replicate that, with more stability. He wanted to succeed on the path his father set forward. That meant piling up a few Truck Series wins and for the team to contend for championships. He says he didn’t allow himself to think any bigger than that, but he wasn’t interested in a backup plan either.
“I’m a burn the ships kind of guy,” Keselowski says, referencing 16th century Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés destroying his ships so his men could not retreat before ultimately annihilating the Aztec Empire and opening the door for Spain to colonize Mexico.
“I didn’t allow myself a lot of time to think about any other options because if I allowed there to be another option, I would always default back to thinking of it.”
He made his NASCAR debut in 2004, running eight Truck Series races for his family team with his dad as the crew chief. But after the team went broke, Keselowski bounced around to a few different rides, and at one point, he walked around the Milwaukee Mile Speedway garage basically begging for a job. Eventually, he got his big break in the summer of 2007 and was driving in the second-tier Xfinity Series for Dale Earnhardt Jr.
But it wasn’t until Keselowski won his first Xfinity race in 2008 at 24 years old that he began thinking bigger for himself. He got the feeling: “Oh, I think I can run around with these Cup guys.”
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Keselowski acknowledges luck has been a large part of his life, like the timing of that phone call from Earnhardt, but he worked to make good on it, ultimately pushing his way to Team Penske’s No. 2 Ford and winning the 2012 Cup championship.
The idea of becoming an owner in NASCAR, following in his father’s steps, never moved to the back of his mind, though. He got there once with Brad Keselowski Racing, a truck team in NASCAR’s third-tier series that fielded current Cup drivers like Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick, Ross Chastain and Austin Cindric. But after 10 seasons, Keselowski elected to shut the team down following the 2017 season.
Materializing an opportunity after this closure, the next year, Keselowski started Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing, which uses resources like metal 3D printers to manufacture parts for the aerospace and defense industries. He set up shop in the building that once played home to BKR.
“He took a race shop and created a manufacturing facility out of it, and the amount of vision that it took to do that is astronomical,” Brian says. “Like, I can’t even imagine how he thought that this was the way he wanted to do things.”
Keselowski also believes he puts himself in positions to get lucky or to extract a favorable outcome from a failure, like begging people in the garage for a job or making it known that Cup ownership was in his sights. And that’s where early talks began with what was then called Roush Fenway Racing.
“I’ve learned so much about people and culture and what a winning culture looks like, what a non-winning culture looks like,” Keselowski says. “I think about that literally every day, maybe 100 times.”
There wasn’t an “epiphany moment” where everything suddenly came together, RFK president Steve Newmark said. But if he had to pinpoint it, he recalled a conversation with Keselowski during the fall of 2020. In his 11th of 12 seasons driving for Team Penske in the Cup Series, Keselowski asked about Roush’s outlook for the future, Newmark said.
“That was when he first disclosed his long-term vision,” Newmark says. “Obviously, he had a long driving career that he still envisioned was ahead of him. But he kind of shared some of his, I guess, strategic plan. And so really, that just led to kind of further dialogue.”
At that point in 2020, Keselowski already had the kind of NASCAR career people only dream of — even if he didn’t initially. Through the 2020 season, he had 34 Cup wins, 33 plus the 2012 championship with Team Penske. His buzzed, post-championship interview with ESPN while holding a giant, foamy, wildly oversized glass of Miller Lite is legendary.
He added win No. 35 to his resume last season, which now ranks him 24th on the all-time list and the fourth-highest active driver headed into the 2022 season.
But Keselowski said he’d do anything to win another championship, even if it meant leaving powerhouse Team Penske. So if he could make a change that he thought would increase his title chances and become a team owner in the process — especially with the reset offered by the Next Gen car’s debut this season — he was all in.
“The move to RFK is somewhat a reflection of that,” Keselowski says. “It’s a reflection of my own disappointment of not winning a championship [and] the realization that if I wanted different results, I needed to do something different. And here I am. And I’m not out seeking headlines for that. I’m not super proud of everything I did at Penske, and I’m not looking to bash anyone. I have no intent to do that. But I am willing to take risks and do things differently because I want to win. I want to win really bad.”
Bringing in Keselowski as an owner was also ideal timing for the team with founder and CEO Jack Roush turning 80 in April. While the driver tiptoed around a specific prediction for the future, Newmark said “there’s no doubt” Keselowski is in line to be Roush’s successor some day.
“Jack has really encouraged us to kind of build that foundation with Brad, and Jack has said many times that this really is the start of passing of the torch,” Newmark says. “The intent behind this is really to have Brad step in and be the future face of the organization.”
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As Keselowski’s friend and former teammate, Joey Logano knows the two faces of the new No. 6 Ford driver — the vocal and “fierce competitor” on the track and the “real down to Earth, good person” away from it.
The former teammates are similar like that, actually, but with their differing (and once complementary) approaches to racing, Logano said he and Team Penske will miss Keselowski’s wealth of racing knowledge and experience as a NASCAR champ. But he’s confident in Keselowski’s ability to succeed in his new driver-owner role.
“He’s too stubborn to fail,” Logano says. “So he’ll make it work — I know he will — and he’ll probably win a few [races] this year.”
Although Roush Fenway Racing has won 137 career Cup races, plus two championships, since it entered the circuit in 1988, it hasn’t won a race since the 2017 season and hasn’t been in serious championship contention in a decade. Keselowski hopes to reverse that course and aims to get both his car and teammate Chris Buescher’s into the 10-race playoffs in the fall.
Changing that starts with adjusting the team’s culture and returning to the aggressive and proactive approach it once had with a premium on on-track performance, Newmark said. Creative with a “very strong intellectual curiosity and insatiable drive to learn,” Keselowski brings ample experience behind the wheel, a vision of progression and vocal leadership with examples to follow. Newmark sees him as a mentor for Buescher.
“That’s a rare combination,” Newmark says.
Keselowski is gushing with enthusiasm and brings “a new energy” to the team, said Buescher, who’s in his seventh full-time Cup season and third behind the wheel of the No. 17 Ford. Buescher noted Keselowski is meticulous and exceptionally detail oriented while constantly multi-tasking.
Roush said his new co-owner is “better organized” and “more methodical” than he is.
Those attributes are noticeable as Keselowski inspects his No. 6 Ford, complete with the manufacturer’s mock Michigan license plate, in the garage before the first Daytona 500 practice Tuesday at Daytona International Speedway. As his crew members work on it, Keselowski examines what they’re doing underneath it while it’s jacked up, poking his head in the space where the left front tire would be and through the driver’s window to catch a glimpse of the cockpit. He consults with crew chief Matt McCall before downing a pre-practice banana and hitting the track.
“I generally go right after the problem and work from there,” Roush says. “He comes at it from the other side, trying to get the meetings set up so that they’re structurally correct and you’ve got the right people involved with the decision making, rather than just swooping in, like I typically do.
Keselowski also runs, according to Buescher, a “spotless” shop.
“From the floors to the walls to the ceilings, everything is getting cleaned up,” Buescher says.
Reddick said what was once BKR “is still, by far, the most beautiful shop I’ve ever stepped foot in in my entire life.”
This, again, is that teenage boy with his head buried in the computer exerting his own control. The family’s shop had been, he’s said, “dirty.” So much effort went into getting to the next race; some details just couldn’t be dealt with.
Now, Keselowski wants to be involved in everything. He’s “relentless and measured,” Newmark noted. He wants to be cc’ed on just about every email, within reason. He wants to contribute in small ways as well as to the big picture while also learning more about the business of running a team at NASCAR’s highest level.
“It’s not to micromanage; it’s to micro understand,” Keselowski says.
Fresh paint, new floors… this new place is starting to feel like home
@RFKracing LETS GO! pic.twitter.com/KTFEyxutFV
— Brad Keselowski (@keselowski) December 9, 2021
And he’s not shy about calling out shortcomings and methods for improvement.
He’ll cite lessons and anecdotes from books he’s read on leadership and winning, and he’ll share some titles with members of the team, like Debrief to Win, written by a former Air Force top gun, or Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.
Never ebooks or audiobooks, Keselowski says he reads hard copies to highlight passages and make notes to compensate for being “a poor reader.”
“I hated reading in school,” he says. “In fact, for the most part, I hate reading today.”
But he tries to read as much as possible. He’s taken notes from Nick Saban and Jim Harbaugh about how to build successful organizations. He loves to study and learn, believing his approach to his education is more valuable than an engineering degree or an MBA, neither of which he has.
“I don’t particularly believe in higher education,” he says. “I think it’s a crutch for ethnography.”
You’ll seldom find him reading fiction. He says almost everything he reads is about personal or professional growth, how to be a better leader and how to find more success on the race track — but there’s a lot of history (especially World War II) scattered in there too. He cited President Harry Truman being an avid reader and using that as a tool to be a better decision maker.
With Keselowski’s head often buried in a book, Logano joked that his former teammate “has more useless knowledge than you’ll ever need in your life.” Keselowski, however, would disagree, and employs that knowledge to better himself and inspire his employees.
“Brad is very refreshing in that he is an eternal optimist, and I think that really rallies people around him,” Newmark says.
“I envision him on the weekends just kind of thinking at a very macro strategic level about what can we be doing to differentiate ourselves? And there are a lot of times that I may get a call from him on a Saturday or Sunday even late at night with, ‘Hey, have we thought about doing this?’”
For as knowledgeable and open as he is, one thing Keselowski wouldn’t disclose is his COVID-19 vaccination status, he says “because it’s become so politicized,” despite the government, medical experts and even NASCAR president Steve Phelps pushing for people to get vaccinated.
“People get very angry about whatever answer you give,” Keselowski says. “In that sense, I’ve made it a point to not answer that question publicly, which is very intentional because I do enough to make enemies as it is. I don’t need to make enemies over something like this.”
Whether it’s at RFK or during his days with Team Penske, Keselowski is known for some out-of-the-box ideas. Looking back on a few, he laughs at his own hubris. Some of Keselowski’s creative ideas never come to fruition or fail when they do, but Newark said the driver embraces the idea of failing forward.
He certainly hasn’t grown demure about pushing new ideas. Keselowski was the “driving force” behind RFK hiring David Smith as the team’s head of analytics. Smith was previously one of the top public motor sports analytics minds in the country, and several crew chiefs and drivers, like Denny Hamlin and William Byron, have referenced his data in the past.
“Jack was very open and has kind of given Brad license to bring these new ideas and bring these new perspectives,” Newark says.
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Ever a contradiction, Keselowski says he appreciates the value in taking risks, but he doesn’t like taking chances — not when it comes to preparation. He’s a self-described perfectionist, recognizing it may be a flaw, but he can’t help it.
“I have lost sleep over races that I won because I didn’t do everything at the highest level,” he explains. “And I’ve slept very well in races where I haven’t won because I feel like I ran a perfect race and something happened completely out of my control.”
Uncontrollable moments are a given in NASCAR, but asserting control when you have it is something Keselowski says he embraces as a cornerstone of returning to a winning culture at RFK. While he can’t control his and his team’s luck on the track, he can try to control what’s done up until the engines are fired each week.
But that leads to sleepless nights as well, especially the night before a race. He’s up running through different race scenarios in his head or pondering additional suggestions for improving the quality of the car. He loathes the idea he might not be prepared for everything — especially the thought of a winning opportunity presenting itself and he’s not ready for it.
“It drives me crazy,” he says.
So when he’s up all night, he’ll reach out to some other night owls on his team to share his thoughts. His former Team Penske crew chief, Jeremy Bullins, is all too familiar with Keselowski’s 2 a.m. texts.
“He was always thinking; he was always looking for the next thing,” Bullins says. “It wasn’t necessarily about the car. It could be a strategy, a thought, or, ‘What if we pit the race like this?’ Or, ‘What if we do this?’ It could be stuff about the car. You never know, it could have been something about a car three weeks away.”
And Keselowski says he’s “already there” with his relationship with new crew chief McCall.
But Keselowski knows he’s not always the smartest person in the room. So whether it’s with RFK or his advanced manufacturing business, he says he pushes to surround himself with the most talented people and provide them with the necessary resources for success in a “safe and healthy” work environment. And then he watches them flourish.
He says one of his favorite benefits of being a business owner is seeing people advance toward success as professionals. He calls their growth a “recurring bucket list item.” He strives for himself and those around him to live up to their “professional max potential.” He loves what he does and has a hard time imagining a future decades from now where he’s not involved in motor sports.
“If I put great resources with great people and an expectation of great processes, we will win; it’s really that simple,” he says. “We might not win every race. We might even lose a lot of races with bad luck. But we’ll win a lot. And if we win a lot, the company will be successful.”
