Last season RFK Racing won 3 races in the NASCAR Cup Series and a lot of praise was showered on veteran driver and team owner Brad Keselowski. The team has been winless so far in 2024 but the respect is still very much alive for the former Cup Series champion and it was made evident by Chris Buescher. In a recent interview, the 31-year-old spoke highly of the team’s changes ever since the veteran walked through the door, and the biggest one seems to be cleanliness and organization.
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“The first thing, the most obvious thing I keep coming to is the first thing that happened. It’s the most noticeable thing every time you walk in a shop — it’s just cleanliness, organization, kind of some workflow stuff. What it probably comes down to more than anything, it’s just details, detail work.”
“But what that surfaced as initially was everything in the shop getting cleaned up, organized. You could eat lunch off the floor now, right? Functionally, it always worked before, but it looks a lot different now. It’s a lot cleaner, it’s a lot more organized,” he said.
Keselowski’s methods were not always well received by the team. There was already a sense of frustration at the team when he joined as RFK Racing had been struggling for several years. Getting organized and clean was one of the first things the former Cup Series champion focused on and it got a lot of people thinking: How is this going to improve our on-track performance? Well it did, and in a big way.
Last year’s 1-2 finish at the Daytona International Speedway was one of the best moments of the team’s recent past and back-to-back wins at Richmond and Michigan preceded that. No one is questioning Keselowski’s methods anymore as he has delivered the results they were so desperate to have.
Brad Keselowski’s focus on the basics was crucial for RFK Racing
To achieve any kind of success, one’s foundation needs to be as strong as it can be. Brad Keselowski figured out that the issues at RFK Racing arose from a lack of organization and discipline the moment he walked into the shop. Coming from Team Penske, the 40-year-old knew exactly what needed to be changed to strengthen that foundation for better things to come and that’s exactly what happened.
“And you look back now, and you can go through the shop, and it looks just the same now as it did three years ago when it first got done. It’s like, alright, well, you start to understand that this was just the foundation for a lot of bigger principles to come,” Buescher added.
Despite last year’s success, the team is winless so far in 2024 and that’s something everyone who works there wants to change. The issue could be with the new Dark Horse Mustang that is yet to deliver but with these Fords, you never know when they might turn up and deliver.
