DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Brad Keselowski isn’t into silver medals.
He hopes to go for the gold in Sunday’s 65th Daytona 500.
The Daytona 500 is the one achievement Keselowski doesn’t have. He won the 2012 NASCAR Cup Series Championship with Team Penske, has won at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and at Talladega (Ala.) as well as some of NASCAR’s other great race tracks.
He has come close to a Daytona 500 win but has never been the driver to celebrate in victory lane.
“I could tick down the last 12 years here of this didn’t go right, there was nothing I could do different,” Keselowski recalled. “Or this didn’t go right, and I maybe should have made a different move here or there, but that’s how it goes.
“It’s the last crown jewel I don’t have. I’ve got the championship and the Brickyards and the Coke 600 and the Southern 500 and the Bristol Night Races and the Talladega’s.
“Those mean the world to me, they really do.
“But the Daytona 500 is still our biggest race of the year no matter how you look at it and it still stings to not have it. It stings to have been so close in so many different ways.”
Keselowski’s only NASCAR Cup Series win at Daytona came in the 2016 Coke Zero 400 when he won the race from the fifth starting position.
He left Team Penske after the 2021 season when he acquired an ownership stake in what is now RFK Racing (Roush, Fenway, Keselowski).
He was one of the fastest drivers entering last year’s Daytona 500 and entered the race as one of the favorites. Instead, he left the Daytona 500 as a ninth-place finisher.
Keselowski enters Sunday’s 65th Daytona 500 starting in 10th position.
What has happened so far doesn’t matter, once the green flag drops to start the race on Sunday.
It starts in the late afternoon and will finish under the lights, with dramatically different track conditions.
Brad Keselowski’s No. 6 Ford on track at Daytona. (HHP/Chris Owens)
“The Daytona 500, once you get in the race, is a different animal,” Keselowski said. “It’ll be a little warmer than it obviously is this morning come race day and you transition from day to night, which is a big deal for the cars and the way they drive.
“In the daytime it’s more about handling and in the nighttime it’s probably a little bit more about just the raw speed in the car. In order to be good here you need to have both – the raw speed and the handling if you’re going to be in position to win this race without catching some extreme luck event like we were talking earlier.
“I knew in the Duel we didn’t have what we needed to win the race with both of those, so we put in the effort today and tomorrow to make sure that we could, and I feel much better about it.”
Keselowski enters the Daytona 500 determined to get a victory. He doesn’t want to leave Florida with that stinging feeling of a near-miss, or another “didn’t get it done” moment like he has experienced so often before.
“I’m not Dale Earnhardt in 1998 or anything like that, but I feel like we’re due more than probably anyone else to win this race,” Keselowski said. “That means nothing when you get on the race track.
“Nobody cares.
“The other drivers don’t care. The other teams don’t care. They’re all out there to win it for their own and you’ve got to go earn it, so all I know to do is just to continue to run up front, be in position, not have to count on lucky breaks and hopefully they go our way or at least we don’t get any bad breaks.”
Leaving the Daytona 500 without a victory is downright painful, according to Keselowski. It’s a stinging feel that doesn’t go away.
“It doesn’t get better,” he said. “It’s super painful. The closer you are to winning the race, the more painful it is.
“The last three years we’ve been either leading or second place in the last few laps, so you know you’re right there. You know that it’s just barely out of reach and so that certainly builds the frustration.
“We came down here a couple years where we weren’t even close and you left here going, ‘Well, that sucked,’ and it didn’t hurt as bad. It hurts a lot worse to be close.”
It’s like training for the Olympics, although the pain of another Daytona 500 loss can come every year.
“The Olympic saying is the worst thing you can do is get a silver,” Keselowski said. “Bronze, you’re happy because you get a medal and gold, of course, you’re happy to leave, but silver you’re that close and it just didn’t happen.
“I feel like I’ve got a lot of Daytona 500 silvers. We’re really hopeful that we can leave with the big trophy this time.”
Keyword: Keselowski On Lack Of Daytona 500 Win: ‘It’s Super Painful’