Photo Credit: Justin McFarland
Despite posting a pair of top-10s in his last two starts at Kansas Speedway, Brad Keselowski is quick to admit that he hasn’t ran as well as he would’ve hoped and calls Kansas one of his weaker tracks.
“We just haven’t found the package that we’re looking for,” he said. “We’ve had good speed in qualifying, but haven’t been able to translate it into the race, and we’ve had a lot of minor hiccups that seem to hit us here. It’s hard to say. I think if we knew exactly what we were missing, we’d find it.”
Looking to improve and locked into the Chase for the Sprint Cup, his team is trying some things to be even better. However, he feels optimistic given the success by his teammate Joey Logano in the recent events at the windy city oval.
“That’s one of the advantages of having a teammate is that sometime you help them out and sometimes they help you out,” he said. “All in all, you both try to be the best, so I’m looking forward to what we have in the race because it seems like every year you come here and practice and qualifying is not a very good indication of the race just because the track surface and some of the changeover between practice, qualifying and race conditions. We haven’t had a lot of speed so far, but I’m very optimistic about the race.”
Though despite trying to build on previous success, he admits that this year is a lot different as well as the new low downforce package combined with the softer tires has resulted in drivers not running wide-open like they were last season.
“Yeah, I would say for sure that the commitment level that causes the pucker factor has gone down because of less downforce,” he commented. “Like I said earlier, we ran wide-open in qualifying here last year and it was, ‘Whoa. I just barely made it.’ It’s not gonna be that way this year. The speeds are down a little bit, but the cars are actually harder to drive, so I feel more like a driver and less like a passenger than I did last year.”
