Another Chance At Home

Brad Keselowski has never won his homecoming race in 10 tries at the Michigan International Speedway, but all the stars are aligning to give him that opportunity in this Sunday’s Quicken Loans 400.

Brad enters this weekend’s race with as much momentum as any driver on the Sprint Cup circuit following consecutive second-place finishes at Dover and Pocono over the last two weeks.

“Brad has been doing a great job behind the wheel and our Miller Lite crew has been executing well at the track,” crew chief Paul Wolfe said. “All the people back at the shop have been building solid cars and our Ford Fusions have been fast. With this being a home race for Brad and for Roger (Penske), as well as just missing those last two, we want this one real bad.”

More than halfway through the Cup regular season now, the No. 2 crew is looking strong. The Deuce has qualified third or better in 10 out of 15 races, including an incredible eight front row starts. He’ll start sixth on Sunday.

The No. 2 crew’s in-race performance has been solid as well. The Miller Lite Ford Fusion has been one of the most consistently fast machines in the field all season, allowing BK to lead at some point in 13 of the 14 races so far this year. Kes currently sits fifth in the series standings with his win in Las Vegas and five other Top 5-finishes.

“Our Ford Fusions have had great speed lately and we’ve been really close to winning the last couple of races,” Brad said this week. “We are ready to move up that one last spot and get a victory at home.”

One area that has improved through significant changes before and during the season is the work in the pits. The Miller Lite team has seen an uptick in the performance of their pit crew in recent weeks, which contributed to their back-to-back second place finishes to Jimmie Johnson at Dover and Dale Earnhardt Jr. at Pocono.

“Our recent results have been pretty decent,” Wolfe said. “Still we are constantly working to improve in all areas of our program. I tend to look at the race results like a report card, if we finish up front we’re doing all right, but we always have room to get better.”

Brad did admit this week that it took a few days for him to move on from the sting of last week’s finish at Pocono, which saw him be passed for the lead by Earnhardt Jr. with four laps remaining while trying to remove debris from the front of his car. He had dominated the race, leading 95 laps.

“I’m not going to say that I got over it right away, because that’s not the case,” Kes said this week. “But for me knowledge is power, and getting over something like that is knowing what I could have done better or should have done differently, researching those things and finding the answer…I think that’s where I find the ability to move on.”

Brad had a similar learning experience last year at Michigan when he came close to taking the checkered flag in the Quicken Loans 400, when a miscommunication with the crew left the Deuce short on fuel after the last scheduled pit stop and dropped Kes from the Top 5 with two laps remaining to a 12th place finish.

The No. 2 team repeated that result in the 2013 Pure Michigan 400 at MIS last August by taking a more conservative fuel strategy despite leading the field with less than 30 laps to go. But this time around, BK wants nothing more than to make good in front of friends and family.

“Racing in Michigan holds that touch of added significance as it is a home race for me,” he said. “Since we’ve yet to win here, there is additional motivation to get to Victory Lane.” 

The wide, sweeping corners, high-banking turns and long straightaways of the 2-mile Michigan International Speedway  make it the fastest track on the Sprint Cup circuit. That bodes well for Brad, who has the fastest average green flag speed on the year, according to NBCSports.com.

“This weekend will likely see some of the highest speeds of the season,” Kes said. “The track surface along with the aero characteristics of these cars ought to combine for what I expect to be record-breaking speeds.”

As part of his homecoming this weekend, BK had a busy day on Thursday with a visit to the Ford headquarters in the afternoon and a stop at The Chase, a bar in Jackson for a Miller Lite appearance on Thursday night. The media blitz continues after the Quicken Loans 400 as well. He will visit Los Angeles on Monday to tape another appearance on the TBS TV show “Sullivan and Son.”

But the hectic scheduled couldn’t slow BK on the track at Michigan on Friday. He was eighth fastest in the morning practice session at MIS with a best lap time of 35.706 seconds and average speed of 201.647 miles per hour. He followed that up by qualifying in sixth position 

The No. 2 crew gets two more chances to tweak their setup on Saturday with practices at 9:30 a.m. ET and 12:30 p.m. ET, both airing on FOX Sports 2.

Coverage of Sunday’s Quicken Loans 400 begins with Countdown to Green at noon ET on TNT. The green flag will fly at approximately 1:16 p.m. ET.