Coming off his first win of the season last week, Brad Keselowski is Going for 2 in more ways than one this weekend at Phoenix International Raceway.
As he climbs into an Alliance Truck Parts colored black and yellow Ford Fusion for the first time this season for the Good Sam 500 at PIR, and continues his quest for his second NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship, BK will also be looking to add to the win column and start stacking victories.
He did just that during his 2012 championship season, when he won five times. He then did so again two years ago, when he won a career-high six times, beginning with a victory in Vegas. In fact, with last Sunday’s win, Brad has now logged 12 of his 18 career Sprint Cup Series wins in even-numbered years and will spend the rest of the 2016 campaign attempting to add to that number. Kes can’t explain the phenomenon that has been his success in even even years, but he plans to ride the wave and try his best to have consistent success.
“I don’t know if there’s really any logic behind that. I don’t feel any different every other year,” he said of the trend. “Sometimes teams just get on streaks good and bad. We finished last year on a really good streak, they just weren’t wins. They were solid, consistent races, leading a lot of laps. I think we’ve carried a lot of that over so far. But that can reset any time. The roller coaster can go up and it goes down. You just try to ride the waves both ways as best you can.”
Of course, their recent history of winning early in seasons also puts the No. 2 team in strong position as the season moves forward. With a victory in their back pocket and a spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup all but locked up, the 2 crew will once again be able to open up their playbook as they attempt to tack on more wins and get into their very best form in time for the Chase. That means crew chief Paul Wolfe will have free rein to see just how much speed he can find in the No. 2 Team Penske Ford.
“It’s huge,” Wolfe said after last week’s win. “Last year we were able to get the win in Fontana, and now here we are even earlier than that. It just allows us the opportunity to continue to try new things and develop our cars to be as strong as we can when the Chase starts. It’ll be some different things we do on race day too. Not having to worry about points any more, we might try some different things here and there—some different setups, explore a little bit.”
Brad’s win last weekend came as the lead of a one-two finish for Team Penske as teammate Joey Logano finished second. It was a great day all around for Penske, as Ryan Blaney turned in a sixth-place finish in the Penske-powered Wood Brothers No. 21 car. The victory was a statement that Penske is one of the squads to be feared on the 1.5-mile tracks, which are a critical component of the Chase.
“Certainly the performance we showed today, finishing one-two with Team Penske, shows that when we get things right, we can be one of the dominant teams—but not by a long ways,” Brad said. “The 20 car (Matt Kenseth) was strong. I thought he was going to win when he got the lead. And the 48 car (Jimmie Johnson), he was fast all day, but we seemed to be able to hang on and work with him, and that was good. Joey got to the lead a couple of times, and I thought he was going to be not passable. And the 18 (Kyle Busch), when he got to the lead, I thought, ‘Oh now we’re racing for second.’ But then he fell off at the end.”
As BK explained, while the season goes along, more and more teams will figure out the setup. In fact that’s already happening at Phoenix. The Joe Gibbs Racing trio of Busch, Carl Edwards and Denny Hamlin qualified 1-2-3 on Friday for Sunday’s race, with their teammate Kenseth close behind in sixth.
Then on Saturday, the two practice sessions were led by the Stewart-Haas Racing duo of Kevin Harvick and Kurt Busch. Nearly all of the top contenders have shown flashes of speed already this season, in addition to a few new names throwing their hats in the ring. Brad was asked by the media on Friday if he pays attention to what’s going on with his fellow drivers or keeps his focus on his own team’s performance and explained that a delicate balance between the two is vitally important to success.
<“There’s a balance between watching other teams and focusing on your own,” he said. “A lot of people will tell you ‘Just do your own thing the best you can and you’ll be alright.’ That’s not really how sports work. You line up against other teams all the time. So I think you have to keep your focus on yourself and the other teams at the same time, which is one way that can make you kind of cross-eyed, but it’s important to do so.”
BK was particularly complementary of the Gibbs quartet, which, thanks to Hamlin’s Daytona 500 victory, is one of three races teams with a win so far this year along with Team Penske (BK at Vegas) and Hendrick Motorsports (Jimmie Johnson at Atlanta). The other three drivers for Gibbs have all been strong contenders for wins and between the four of them, JGR drivers have led 261 of the 797 laps runs in the Sprint Cup Series so far this season. Their qualifying performance at Phoenix shows they have speed once again this weekend and it will be paramount to Penske’s chances to try to catch up.
The Gibbs cars, there’s a reason why they’re 1-3 right now. They have a lot of speed and they’re doing things at a very high level,” Brad said. “They’ve had a shot at winning the first three races and been very close to doing that. I don’t know if anyone else can say the same. It’s our goal to of course go out there and find some speed to be able to put up the numbers they’re putting up in qualifying and hopefully we can do so. But they have a lot to be proud of with the things that they’ve done to their cars to make them so fast and of course we want to do the same and get ahead.”
Despite the dominant speed of some teams, the racing has been tremendous thus far under NASCAR’s new low-downforce aerodynamics package. Over the first three races, 20 different drivers have held the lead for at least one lap and the season has featured 68 lead changes over three weeks. Last week’s finish also showed just how much setups can vary.
Kyle Busch’s car was outstanding early on the final run. With last year’s package, he very well might have checked out and ran away with a win. But instead, the No. 18 Toyota fell off over the long run, and BK’s No. 2 Ford only grew stronger, allowing Kes to ultimately roar past Busch and race to the win.
“This new rules package, I thought it was tremendous,” Brad said. “The cars fell off a lot at the end of the run and you really have to drive them sideways. It took a lot of balance as a driver, a lot of precise footwork and accuracy with where you want to put your car and how to place it—which is exactly what we want. This shouldn’t be easy. This is the Sprint Cup Series, the cars should be hard to drive.”
Phoenix brings a new challenge entirely as the first one-mile track of the season. It’s a track that Brad has run consistently at over the course of his career, but has never conquered. BK does boast seven Top 10s and four Top 5s, but no wins on PIR’s 1.022-mile tri-oval.
All seven of those Top 10s have come in the last four years, with the only run outside the Top 10 during that time being a 11th place finish late in the 2013 season. He’s also led 115 laps at Phoenix over the last four years, including at least one lap in all but one of the last eight races on the Arizona desert oval.
“Phoenix has been a pretty good track for us the last half dozen or so times we’ve run it,” Kes said. “We’ve run up front, led laps, or at least been solid Top 5, solid Top 10s and we want to keep that streak going.
He’ll look to add another strong finish to his track record in the desert, and as the No. 2 crew takes the next step in the season, BK hopes NASCAR will look at doing the same. He talked at length after his win last weekend about the new aero package, and explained that, as the season goes along, the engineers heading up NASCAR’s top teams will squeeze every drop of speed they can out of the new package until the playing field is leveled again.
“As far as the downforce package is concerned, we have to continue to stay ahead of that as a sport,” Brad said. “To continue to have great finishes to races as we did today, and quite a few passes for the lead. I think that’s what we’ve all come to expect from this mile-and-a-half racing. I think that’s what we saw, which is something to be proud of.”
So far it’s the JGR and Stewart-Haas groups leading the pack at Phoenix, but the Team Penske trio isn’t too far behind. Brad was 11th quickest in Friday’s opening practice session while Logano ran third quickest and Blaney was right behind BK in 12th.
The speed deserted Brad in qualifying, however. After running eighth quickest in the first round, with a 26.304 second lap at an average speed of 136.681 mph, the Deuce ran an almost identical lap in round two while most others were significantly faster. That left Brad back in 19th, failing to reach the final round of knockout qualifying. He’ll start Sunday’s race in P19, while Logano and Blaney, who both made it to the final round, will start in 9th and 12th respectively. BK left the garage on Friday hoping to take a thing or two from the No. 22 and No. 21 teams that the No. 2 crew can apply to their car.
“We haven’t been exactly where we want to be speed-wise this weekend but we haven’t been in race trim yet, so I’m optimistic about that,” Kes said Friday evening. “My teammates have been really fast, so there’s some things to be learned from there and hopefully we can apply them.”
The adjustments to the Alliance Truck Parts Ford didn’t take for Saturday’s first practice, which saw BK run 21st quickest. But just a few hours later it seemed the team had finally found their speed. As a result, the No. 2 car was seventh fastest in final practice, putting them in good position headed into Sunday’s race. Brad isn’t sure how much the momentum from last week’s win will carry over into this week’s race, but one thing he’s confident in is the performance of the 2 Crew, which was a key to his win.
“These tracks are so different that there’s not a lot to really compare,” he said. “I’m not sure a lot of it carries over, other than my pit crew, which was blazing fast last week and made my life a lot easier.”
The Good Sam 500 will go green shortly at 3:44 p.m. ET on Sunday and can be seen on FOX.