Athletes in football and other sports are often seen with a black horizontal line painted beneath their eyes. One driver in the NASCAR Cup Series who follows this practice is the RFK Racing co-owner, Brad Keselowski. He was asked about the reason behind it by a fan in a recent engagement session to answer questions from Reddit.
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Keselowski revealed that it reduced the glare that he experiences from inside the car. Typically, teams use tints on the windshield to help drivers see better on days when the sun hits them directly. But what this does is hinder the drivers from judging whether the track is wet or not. And so, the workaround that Keselowski has figured out is this eye paint.
He said, “When you have tint on the windshield, you can’t see those (rain) spots on the racetrack. So, what we tend to do with my cars is try not to run the tint on any races where we think it might rain.
“The problem with that is that it makes it very bright inside the race car. The glare gets worse. Using eyeblack helps to offset that without making it to where I can’t see the racetrack when it’s wet.”
Technically, black and white aren’t colors but shades. Black is a combination of all the different wavelengths we see when no light is reflecting off an object. When a driver races across the track, the sunlight can disturb his perception of depth and his ability to assess what lies ahead of him. The eye paint absorbs the interfering sunlight better than the natural skin tone and reduces glare.
Can Keselowski make his way into the playoffs?
One more shot remains for the drivers who are still dreaming of winning the 2025 Cup Series championship and haven’t secured a playoff berth yet. Saturday’s race at Daytona will be the last opportunity they have to reach Victory Lane and scrape through to the postseason as one of the 16 drivers in the playoffs.
After a below-average start to the season, Keselowski has finally found speed in his No. 6 Ford Mustang Dark Horse in recent weeks. He finished ninth at Richmond last weekend, third at Iowa, and fifth in Indianapolis. There is every possibility that he puts his car in the right spot this Saturday and creates a massive upset.
Furthermore, he will be fueled by the birth of his fourth child, a son. The little tyke arrived in the world on August 20.