Five years ago last July, Brad Keselowski stood up at the NASCAR Hall of Fame and told the world he was leaving one of the sport’s most successful car owners, Roger Penske, to win races and another NASCAR Cup Series championship at Roush Fenway Racing.
While the challenge was daunting, this 2012 Cup champion made his goals very clear: anything less than a title would be a massive disappointment.
“When I came to Team Penske,” Keselowski said then, “The car I got in was in similar position in points and standings to the one I’m going to get in [2022], and in two-and-a-half years’ time, we were able to win a championship. I carry those same expectations forward and the expectations are very high.”
How difficult it must be for one of the sport’s best and brightest to leave the legendary Roush team emptyhanded.
That’s the reality for Keselowski Tuesday (Sept. 29) with his shock announcement he’s leaving the team and selling back his ownership in RFK Racing effective the end of the 2026 season. For a driver who envisions himself a part of the sport for the rest of his life, giving back a forever spot on the grid had to have been a gut-wrenching choice.
It isn’t when you crunch the numbers, though. After a successful stint as a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series owner, Keselowski fell far short of the standard Tony Stewart and even Alan Kulwicki set for driver/owners in his position. He might have left Roush in a better place behind the scenes, but behind the wheel?
Keselowski might look back and wonder what heights he could have reached if he stayed at Penske.
The goal, of course, moving from Ford’s current flagship program to its former one was to flip the script and return Roush to past glory. Instead? Barring a stunning Chase reversal, Keselowski will end five years of ownership without a single one of his drivers finishing inside the top five in Cup points. None of his teams qualified for the Championship 4, with Chris Buescher topping out at seventh in the 2023 elimination-style format. He and RFK Racing teammate Ryan Preece made this year’s Chase but sit well outside the top 10.
The Penske car Keselowski left behind, meanwhile, won the first race out of the box without him, with Austin Cindric capturing the 2022 Daytona 500 as a rookie. That organization has gone on to collect three of the last four Cup championships, some 29 race wins and two dozen pole positions. Their place atop the Ford ladder, in a world where manufacturer support remains paramount, seems more secure than before the letter K popped up on a Roush billboard in North Carolina.
Every day during those five years, Keselowski watched as the Roush nameplate produced the very same Roush Yates engines Penske cars would use to blow by him. A Roush team that holds 144 Cup wins to its name, along with back-to-back Cup championships in the early 2000s hasn’t cashed in on one since Kurt Busch captured the first ever Chase for the Championship in 2004.
For a time, Keselowski’s business and people-focused approach seemed capable of turning RFK around. His peak with the program came in 2023, finishing eighth in the standings with 16 top-10 finishes. He also deserves credit for expansion, bringing the sponsorship in for a third car and believing in the talents of Ryan Preece when everyone else had kicked him to the curb.
But even Keselowski’s best year couldn’t match his final one with Penske in 2021. During the five years before the RFK decision, he finished inside the top 10 in points in every one of them. Twice, he made the Championship 4 and fell 2.7 seconds short of a second career title in 2020. During that five-year span, he visited victory lane 13 times.
With RFK? That’s happened only once, a May 2024 race at Darlington Raceway that feels like a lifetime ago. In the past two years, Keselowski has just eight top-five finishes; Shane van Gisbergen has nearly the same number of wins (seven). Keselowski’s failed to make the postseason both those years as his own winless drought has grown to some 89 races.
The past three seasons, Keselowski has posted an average finish of 15.6 or worse. Even Ryan Newman, the driver he replaced at Roush, posted a 14.6 average finish as recently as 2019 driving the No. 6 Ford. Keselowski’s crew chief, Jeremy Bullins, had already decided to move on to Riley Herbst instead for 2027.
Five years in, it all added up to a fork in the road for RFK’s primary driver. While Stewart had won championships by this point, and Denny Hamlin‘s 23XI Racing program is competing for them six years in, RFK remains firmly stuck in the middle tier of a NASCAR hierarchy it’s been placed in for the better part of 15 years now.
At age 42, Keselowski knows the clock is ticking, and late-career success is still possible: Hamlin finds himself competing for a title at 45. Short-term prospects are uncertain; most of the 2027 spots are filled on the Cup grid, but it’s not often a former champion becomes available. There are more than a few drivers going to bed this week worried about their job security.
Any future path would likely include ownership: Keselowski is one of the smartest, business-minded drivers in the garage and feels like he can be successful running a team. Smart money and family history would strongly suggest that Dodge enters the mix, no matter how many public denials and limited opportunities there are right now. Dodge executives would be stupid not to pursue him.
But as Keselowski closes this RFK chapter, it would be only human to wonder what life would be like if he chose an easier path. It’s only logical one of the Ryan Blaney–Joey Logano championships of the early 2020s could have been his, achieved with some of the same personnel Keselowski lobbied to get while building 12 years of equity at Penske.
He left all of it to topple the very empire he had a hand in building, one that has kept thriving long after he left. It’s a decision he’s going to have to sit with forever.
“I’ve been very privileged to drive for Team Penske and to have the success we’ve had,” he said in 2021. “It’s tough to leave that, and I don’t want to deny that in any shape or form, but this is a big dream of mine that was worth leaving it for.”
On paper, the way the end of this story is unfolding, it didn’t end up working out that way. All that’s left to do is move on, reset the dream and try again.
“When we can resign ourselves to the wishes that will never come true,” Mister Rogers once said, “There can be enormous energies available within us for whatever we do.”
Follow Tom Bowles on X at @RacingBowles
The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 50+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.
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