Brad Keselowski said after Chris Buescher’s Richmond win this past July that he felt like RFK Racing has moved from irrelevant to relevant. The next step was being contenders. Now, here Buescher is into the Round of 8 and Keselowski held the final spot to the third round heading into Sunday’s race on the ROVAL.

“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,” he said then. “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.”

How about now?

“We’re letting our results speak for themselves,” he said after Buescher’s win in Michigan a week later. “Chris has done a heck of a job driving the car. When you get win, it feels really good.

“We got to keep some humbleness and keep our head down. There’s some great competition out here.

“Yeah, it’s been two great weekends. I’m just thrilled to death for our company. There’s a lot of people just working their guts out, trying to push, work within the limits of the rules and regulations, but not leave anything on the table, at the same time executing at the highest of levels, whether it be on pit road, restarts, whatever else it takes. I’m happy for them, their efforts getting them the results they deserve.”

Ford’s have just 6 wins this season. RFK has half of them.

“We do have two cars and we’re a two-car team, and we have both cars there,” said Keselowski. “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.”

Buescher has 3 wins (Richmond, Michigan, Daytona). One more gets him not only to four wins, but to Phoenix with a shot at a championship.

“I mean, so much has happened in 15 years I’ve been there,” said Buescher. “But the last two years, last 18 months, just to see the turnaround, new car kind of being a good reset for us, to be able to be competing for wins.

“A lot of different size racetracks, a couple checkered flags now, some great pit strategy there, great pit stops. It’s every department working hard to make this happen and get us this checkered flag.”

Keselowski said the peaks and valleys are as high and low there than anywhere else.

“Yeah, the highs are high and the lows are low over here,” he said. “We had a lot of lows last year. It’s nice to have these high marks. I don’t take ’em for granted. They mean more to me probably because of how big a struggle last year was for both teams. Probably even more specifically for me.

“I’m thrilled for it. I know the work that goes into it on all aspects. I’m thrilled for every department of our company, from the marketing side through all of competition.

“We’ve come so far. We still have a long ways to go to get to where I want us to be, but we’re building some really strong momentum with these wins.

“I’m just as curious as anyone else to see where it goes from here. I try not to have expectations for good or bad. I just try to do our best, see what that plays out to on the field.”

Buescher had just two career Cup wins in his first 278 starts. He’s now won 3 of the last 11.

It’s a far cry from where Roush was a few years ago.

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 58 races into an ownership role, Buescher is one round away from a championship.