RFK Racing co-owner and driver Brad Keselowski is in the early stages of what could wind up being his toughest NASCAR Cup Series season yet. But it hasn’t been for a lack of on-track performance.
Keselowski continues to deal with the lingering effects of a broken femur, suffered in a freak accident during a December ski trip with his family. He’s spent hours rehabbing the injury daily, but despite a cane in hand and a noticeable limp, the 41-year-old has turned every lap over the first three points-paying races of the 2026 campaign. His status for last week’s road course race at Circuit of The Americas was admittedly in jeopardy, but the 2012 titleholder elected to tough it out rather than turn his No. 6 Ford over to stand-by driver Joey Hand. The Michigander finished 20th, salvaging 17 points out of the series’ annual trip to Austin, Texas.
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In his fifth year owning the Jack Roush-formed company, Keselowski led by example. Ryan Preece certainly noticed.
“I’ve lived it,” said the driver of RFK’s No. 60 Ford, competing in his second season with the organization.
Preece has battled plenty of adversity throughout this Cup career, both on and off the track. He raced in an unchartered No. 37 Chevrolet for JTG-Daugherty Racing Chevrolet for the entire 2021 season, needing to qualify on speed for each of the 36 races on the schedule. A year later, Preece went without a full-time ride in any of NASCAR’s three national series, acknowledging after his win in this February’s Cook Out Clash that, at times, he was close to moving back to Connecticut and giving up on his dream.
The now 35-year-old landed with Stewart-Haas Racing for two seasons before the organization shut its doors. In 2023, his first season driving the team’s No. 41 Ford, Preece went for a terrifying ride during the summer race at Daytona, barrel rolling over a dozen times down the backstretch before finally landing on all fours. He exited under his own power and was transported to a local hospital for further evaluation.
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Preece went home the next day. A week later, with bloodied eyes nearly swollen shut, he returned to his car at Darlington Raceway.
ryan preece darlington 2023
“I can appreciate it because the things that I’m going to put myself through to race, so is Brad,” Precce said during a Wednesday media teleconference. “I’ve learned pretty quickly that he and I are very similar in the aspects of what we’re going to put ourselves through to compete and show others that we will do whatever it takes to race, to competitively attempt to win and put our teams in position.
“I know there was a lot of conversation last week at COTA around, man, is Brad going to race? But as a race car driver, what I see him doing every day, and then as a race car driver, like, you weren’t taking him out of that race car because you wouldn’t take me out of that race car. So I think, you know, as a racer and the family that he came from and the family that I come from, we’re taught at a very young age — that’s what makes us different. We’re willing to do whatever it takes to compete.”
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To a different degree, Preece battled his own adversity last Sunday. He was among a group of drivers, including AJ Allmendinger, who suffered cool suit failures over 95 laps in the scorching Texas heat. Preece finished 18th, marking his best finish at the 17-turn road course in his last four trips.
“I was plenty beat up or feeling it a bit, but I was plenty fine to drive that race car to its ability,” Preece explained, reflecting on the weekend. “Those are the races that define you and your race team. Yeah, 18th was the end result, but between yesterday and today, I’ve been thinking about, been going back and watching some on-car (cameras) from other cars around us, and probably some things that I could’ve done better to get us to a 16th or 15th, maybe. But that’s the name of the game. You’re going to have days where you wish you would’ve done things a little different or reacted to situations a little different, but the deal is you got to move forward to the next week.
“The clock resets at midnight, and you move on. That’s what our focus is: moving onto Phoenix.”
Through three races, all three RFK teams sit inside the top 16 of points, headlined by Chris Buescher in 11th. Keselowski is 12th after nearly pulling off a Daytona 500 victory, with Preece in 16th. Spire Motorsports is the only other organization with all of its cars inside the provisional cutoff for The Chase.
