When Brad Keselowski signed on as a co-owner/driver at Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing last year, he joined a company that had been floundering.

From 2015 through 2021, the company founded by NASCAR Hall of Famer Jack Roush had won two races—both on superspeedways and both by 2023 Daytona 500 winner Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who has since moved on to JTG-Daugherty Racing.

RFK picked up one victory last season in the person of Chris Buescher, who has added three wins to his column this season. Both RFK cars—those of Buescher and Keselowski—have qualified for the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs this year.

But Keselowski isn’t satisfied. Asked whether he thought the organization was ahead of the schedule he envisioned when he joined the company, he replied emphatically, “Oh, no. Gosh, I wanted to be here last year.

“But that’s not where we were. That’s not what we were prepared for. The good news is we’re here now, and we still have a lot of potential.”

Keselowski has to balance family life and his work as both an owner and a driver with heading a 3D-printing company he founded in 2019. He doesn’t care that his duties don’t give him time to relax.

“I don’t want to relax,” Keselowski said. “I don’t want to be on vacation. I want to win. I want to be a part of fixing this. That’s the juice for me. Being on the beach or whatever, that’s not fun.

“Fun for me is turning around a company and seeing guys like Chris Buescher be successful, seeing a new pit crew guy come in or a mechanic who’s never won a race or a new partner come into the sport and have their first chance in Victory Lane.

“That’s better than any vacation I’ll ever go on.”

Keselowski knew what he was up against in going from one of the top teams in the sport to a rebuilding effort with Roush Fenway Racing. See, the 39-year-old is a dreamer. He’s also a big thinker too. One that is relentless and won’t stop working until he gets those goals in his head accomplished. That’s why even when some folks called him crazy for leaving an established seat with a storied organization to join a team that hasn’t won a Cup race in 5 years, it was a task Keselowski wanted to take on firsthand.

Keselowski isn’t built on just being complacent though. Most people in this world would be okay with their job in winning awards, making lots of money and just staying in their comfort zone. Leaders though? Well they don’t settle. They always stive for more and stive to be the greatest at everything they do.

Winners want to be challenged. They think long-term and not what’s happening in the moment. Keselowski isn’t a person that’s worried about the right now. He’s about leaving a legacy for his name, for his family, for his wife and kids. Sure, he could have won many more races with Team Penske and even taken another championship or two in the process.

But what about a decade from now? Where would he be then?

Two summers ago a Michigan born race car driver bought into an organization owned by a Michigan man. Keselowski came from the same mold as Jack Roush. They just took different paths to come together. Now two Michigan men sharing the same goal with one able to finally bring the other what he’s long been chasing since his team was left for ruin.

At one point, Jack Roush was one of the teams to beat. Then a change over occurred. It was a place to where drivers came to leave. Carl Edwards, Matt Kenseth, Jamie McMurray, Kurt Busch, Greg Biffle, all had success with Roush before they each left for new teams.

There was that lull that some wondered when the tidal wave was going to come over. They went from annually competing for championships to just trying to get by.

Keselowski knew what it took to be a successful owner. He groomed several Cup drivers now in his Truck Series team. From Daniel Hemric to Tyler Reddick to Ryan Blaney you name it, they all were groomed under Keselowski’s tutelage.

Running a Truck team became too expensive, so Keselowski had to sell it all off. He turned his focus back to full time Cup Series driving but always had his eye on the future and wanting to get back in the ownership game.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option with Team Penske and Keselowski didn’t want to do what Denny Hamlin is doing by racing for one team and owning another. That’s why he signed a one-year deal in 2020 to come back in 2021 but look elsewhere for a driver-owner role in 2022.

Roush made the perfect sense.

They needed help too. Keselowski could bring his talents over as a driver. He can bring what he learned from a Truck Series owner as well as watching Roger Penske every day for the last decade with him for the front office.

Together, two Michigan men with a Michigan run manufacturer (Ford) can take this blue-collar team from the basement to at least the ground level.

So off Kesselowski went. But you have to think that this wasn’t an easy decision still. He is a father. He is a husband. He’s human. He built a name for himself with a top team in NASCAR and he was taking a massive risk by leaving everything that he’s accomplished to build something new.

To do so, challenges were going to lie ahead. He wasn’t going to be home quite as often. He was going to be on the phone more. Those daily routine activities with his wife and kids were going to go by the wayside while he built this thing up.

There’s moments where little kids want their dad but their dads mind may be elsewhere. He may be stuck at the office. Some people have those big dreams and goals but stop short when they realize that it was going to affect family time at home.

Keselowski took the risk. He jumped in anyways.

At Penske, you have the resources to win races weekly and championships annually. Going to Roush Fenway (formerly), an organization that’s last win came in July 2017 at Daytona, it was going to be a challenge ahead.

Heading into 2022, Roush Fenway had 2 victories in the last 252 races. In that span (since 2015), RFR had just 29 top five finishes, 86 top 10’s and 620 laps led since the start of the 2015 season. In that same span, Keselowski had 19 wins, 88 top fives, 148 top 10’s and 5,584 laps led. He had almost as many top five finishes (26) between 2019 and 2020 than RFR has had in the last seven years.

This wasn’t necessarily about making this team competitive again, that’s the easy goal, it was having to completely undo a culture that had settled into RFR and build a new mantra for RFK Racing.

That’s not an easy task. It’s hard to see through good people that may not be great people for this job. There’s some likeable personalities that were already established with that organization that had families, but Keselowski knew that while he liked them, they may not fit his criteria on what it takes to be great.

That’s the hard part of this job that no one realizes. To go from bad to good is one thing, but to go from bad to great is a whole different story.

There’s good people in this world that are okay with being okay. There’s also people in this world that aren’t okay with mediocre. They want greatness. They want to be on top and they’ll do everything in their power in the meantime to get there.

That’s what Keselowski was facing when he walked into the doors of the shop on Day 1. Who’s ready to work? Who’s ready for challenges ahead? Who’s ready for uncomfortable conversations and being put in uncomfortable situations to be great? Remember, there’s people that are with RFK Racing when he started that got content like Keselowski could have been with Penske. He had to see who can get outside of that comfort zone and follow where Keselowski was trying to lead them.

You can quickly tell who is and who isn’t and unfortunately some of the “who isn’t” may be great people personally but may not have what it takes to be at a championship level. So you first have to establish who that is and work with them and weed out the ones who aren’t.

Not everyone is built for greatness. Keselowski is, but he had to find who he can trust to go with him on his journey back to the top. After all, he left comfort to build this and he was going to do it the right way.

One person that he felt was valuable was Chris Buescher. He noticed that several years ago. So in the early portions of his new role with RFK, he felt like he had to snag him up for years to come.

“I went to a Ford driving school with him somewhere around 2015, and I was blown away by his talent and his feel for the car,” Keselowski said last year of Buescher. “I just felt like he didn’t have the support system around him to be successful with the teams he was with.

“I kind of felt like he was a hidden free agent gem that wasn’t being scouted properly and felt that way for a handful of years. So yeah, the first thing — it was literally the first thing I did when I signed the papers at RFK.

“The next step after signing my papers was putting an offer in front of him to give him a contract extension. I thought he was somebody we could build around and get results, and today clearly shows that that was the case.”

Now, just 52 races into an ownership role, Buescher has won 4 times and both cars are vying for a championship.

“I told somebody, a lot of you guys here this year, we moved from irrelevant to relevant. The next step is to try to be contenders. You get to the contender status by winning races.

“We’re not where we want to be. We want to be where we win every week, we’re 1-2 finishing. This is another step in our progression and a lot to be proud of.”

They were just 1-2 in Daytona and coming into the playoffs hot.

With Ford only having 5 wins this season, RFK Racing has three of them. Penske, Keselowski’s former team, has the other 2. However, one could say that there’s not much a difference between Penske and RFK Racing anymore either.

Keselowski says that he wouldn’t want to quantify that yet, but he does feel like they’re in a really good spot already.

“I don’t know how you would measure that. How do you quantify what’s best and what’s not?

“If you go by wins, yeah, we’ve got a win and we’re locked in the Playoffs. That feels good, right? I think we’re on a good streak. If you go by points, I think the 12 and the 22 are maybe in front of us in points.

“Fords, we’re all really close. 12, 22, 17, the 4, we’re all very close in points. I don’t know how you quantify who’s best and who’s not.

“I think the four cars – the 22, 12, 4 and 17 – are all right on top of each other. I’m right there as well. Maybe the five of us you could lay a blanket over.

“We do have two cars and we’re a two-car team, and we have both cars there. We don’t have any good cars or bad cars. We don’t have any bad cars, which that feels good.

“We’re positioning ourselves to get there one day, and I’m proud of that. That’s earned, right? You got to earn that title. You do that with winning multiple races and contending for championships. We’re knocking on the door of that.

“Until we are walking in at Phoenix with three or four win stickers on our cars, it’s hard to say that we’re the best. That’s what we want to be.”