“I’ve been told, ‘I’m not big enough. I’m not fast enough. I’m not strong enough. And I don’t have what it takes.’ Every step of my life, I heard people say that to me. And that’s the motivation I carried. This year, with this team, I realized that that was wrong. That’s not the right thing to motivate you. You can’t do this sport by yourself no matter how good you are. You have to have a team. And a team is much bigger than who you see out here wearing Miller Lite shirts. It’s my family. It’s my friends. It’s my fans. It’s every one of these guys that makes this possible.”
— Brad Keselowski after winning the 2012 NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship.
For Brad Keselowski, the 2012 NASCAR season was a transformative year. It saw not only his ascendance as one of racing’s pre-eminent talents, but his emergence as one of the faces of the sport. It was also marked by his tremendous growth as a driver, a leader and a person.
“It takes leadership in any organization to win,” said Roger Penske, head of Penske Racing. “What Brad has done is focused. He was focused on racing. He was focused on winning. He spends every day with some time in the shop, his arms around our guys, and that’s the glue. When a guy like that comes around, he can build you up. That’s what he does.”
Virtually no one outside of Brad and his team saw the Miller Lite Dodge No. 2 as a Sprint Cup favorite prior to the start of the 2012 season. At NASCAR Media Day on Feb. 22, 2012, the talk was not of contending for a title, but rather, recapping his fifth place Sprint Series finish in 2011, and discussing his Twitter following, which at that time, was only 60,000.
Ironically, the first major moment for Brad in 2012 would come on social media in the year’s opening race, the Daytona 500. Brad, who had already built a reputation among NASCAR drivers for his use of Twitter, broke social media ground by tweeting from his car during a race stoppage. Driver Juan Pablo Montoya had rammed the raceway’s jet dryer truck, causing an explosion that Brad captured in a photo. The landmark tweet would become one of the defining social media moments of 2012.
Fire!My view twitter.com/keselowski/sta…
— Brad Keselowski (@keselowski) February 28, 2012