Team Penske and RFK Racing’s NASCAR Relationship Detailed by Austin Cindric

Brad Keselowski left Team Penske at the end of 2021 and purchased his ownership stake at RFK Racing. Austin Cindric, the winner of the 2022 Daytona 500, then filled the blank space Keselowski left back at Roger Penske’s team. However, to this day, the two teams share a relationship as they go and race every weekend. But how exactly are these two Ford teams related?

Do they have an alliance? In an interview with Sky View Sports, Cindric opened up about how collaborative the teams get as the race day approaches.

“There’s obviously a lot of collaboration between the Ford teams as far as some information shared on race weekends and the work that all the teams did as well as Ford Performance to kind of aerodynamically get ready for the season and make improvements we’ve made with the Dark Horse Mustang,” he explained.

However, at the end of the day, both these teams are competitors. There can be just one winner in each race, and both will give it their all to stay up front and win it.

So all that alliance will certainly not show itself on race day.

FRM insider spills the reason behind ending their alliance with RFK Racing

What sets the bigshot teams like Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing is that they have the technical and monetary ability to compete in NASCAR’s top-tier racing series. Smaller teams do not have that. Therefore, they often resort to forming alliances with the sharks in the garage. One such alliance in 2024 is going to be between Front Row Motorsports and Team Penske.

After working alongside RFK Racing for quite some time now, Front Row Motorsports is switching alliances this year. And just a few days ago, FRM driver Michael McDowell’s crew chief, Travis Peterson, told SiriusXM NASCAR radio the reason behind that decision.

“It is almost a team practice to get new personnel and can get communication, get backflowing things like that than it is really developing the setup at this point,” he said. “Just because of what we have going on, but you certainly have time to do that, those days never shut off during the off-season. The smaller teams like us have to do those things to survive, just because we don’t have the big engineering department.”

“The gist is that you don’t have 20 engineers at shop providing information at our place, so you kinda go, be aligned with a team that does have and use their information,” he added. After winning the race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway last year, McDowell established the fact that he can grab the checkered flag at the most unexpected times.

And with Penske’s alliance, can the #34 team repeat the feat this year, too?

Only time will tell.