Brad Keselowski appeared to reject the main reasoning that RFK President Chip Bowers provided for the split between Keselowski and the team.
At the beginning of October ahead of the NASCAR Cup race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Bowers shared what was seemingly the primary reason for why the team was splitting with Keselowski.
He said, “For Brad is that he really has an interest in being a race car driver for the foreseeable future. I think a 5-year+ plan is what he’s got his eyes on. And I applaud that. We are excited about Brad, considering all the things that he’s considering and things he wants to achieve on the track. I think that’s tremendous. We’re going to be rooting for him the entire way.”
“I think for us as an organization, as we looked at it, if you look back as we started our journey together five years ago, we had an idea of Brad taking on a very ambitious role. He’s going to be race car driver, he’s going to be Head of Competition, he’s going to be minority owner. He’s a businessman and has interest outside of our organization. He’s a father. That is an incredible amount of things to balance. And we have a lot of empathy for just how hard all of that is to achieve and achieve at a high level,” he continued.
“So when we looked at it, we wanted to make sure organizationally that not only we set ourselves up for near-term success, but really long-term sustainable success. And so when we started looking at what the next three years look like for us an beyond, it was clear that we wanted Brad to start focusing more on his role in competition. We felt like, as you all know, you look at Chris Gabehart or Chad Knauss, and the list goes on and on and on. These are 24/7 jobs. You have to live, breathe it constantly. And if we want to be in the same conversation as Hendrick Motorsports and Penske Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing, it’s going to take that level of commitment. And that’s what we’re focused on as a company. That’s what we’re focused on across the entire organization.”
“So for us, we wanted that to be a natural transition over the next two to three years for Brad. I think he wants to continue to drive for much longer than that, and that’s fine. We applaud that. Like I said, we want to give Brad, because we have so much immense respect and appreciation for Brad, every opportunity to do all the things he wants to do in his career,” he added. “But that’s what makes it so hard. This is a business and we just weren’t aligned with that and that happens sometimes. We just wanted to make the competition side more of a focus. He wanted to focus more on the driving side. We get that and that’s why it took us so long to get here. Is that we worked so hard and diligently to find a solution and just couldn’t get there. And that happens sometimes in business.”
Speaking to the media ahead of the Cup race at Charlotte, Keselowski was asked if there was something that he was not willing to give up in negotiations for his next deal.
He answered, “I don’t have anything. Probably the only thing I would say is I’m not willing to do something that would harm my career or harm somebody else.”
When he was specifically asked about Bowers comments, Keselowski responded, “I have no comments about RFK at this time. All that will work its way out. It’ll be clearer over the next month or two as well.”
However, when the question was rephrased about how long he would like to drive for with a specific mention of another two to three years, he replied, “I would love to. Is that mandatory to getting a deal done? Absolutely not. But it’s where my aspirations are, for sure. There’s plenty of opportunities that don’t entail that, that interest me.”
Furthermore, when he was asked his performance and only winning a single race in the last five years, Keselowski pointed to the company not being in the best equipment.
He said, “I know I’m capable of winning more. I mean you’re right I’ve only won once in the last five years, but then I’ve got like eight or nine second place finishes and a lot of shoulda, woulda, coulda’s that were outside of our control. I feel like in tier 1 equipment that I can win a lot more races.”
Sailors assigned to Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine USS Greeneville (SSN 772) meet with NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski during NASCAR San Diego Weekend on Naval Base Coronado, June 20, 2026. Marking the nation and the Navy’s 250th birthday celebrations, NASCAR San Diego Weekend, hosted aboard Naval Base Coronado June 19-21, delivers a unique, high-profile sports experience that blends motorsports with Navy heritage. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Tiarra Brown)
From there Keselowski compared himself to Mark Martin, who also left Roush at the end of his career to compete with Ginn Motorsports and Dale Earnhardt Inc., Hendrick Motorsports, and Michael Waltrip Racing. Martin had a standout year with Hendrick Motorsports in 2009, where he won five races and finished second in the points behind Jimmie Johnson.
“I was thinking about it the other day with some different comments and I feel like a really similar conversation in my career to where like a Mark Martin was circa 2004 and 2005. People were looking at his recent successes and saying he couldn’t do it. He got the right opportunity and whether it was the DEI car then the Hendrick car and he was super competitive and could win races.”
“When you’re not in the right opportunity it doesn’t matter who you are as a driver,” Keselowski continued. “There’s an old Kevin Harvick saying. ‘You can’t make a slow race car go fast.’ And you can’t drive a slow race car fast. That’s just how it is. And I don’t think our cars are awful, but clearly we’re not tier 1. I’m proud of the work that we put in and I’m proud of where I’m at as a driver and I feel comfortable in tier 1 that I could win races,
While he admits that RFK Racing is not tier 1, he says the potential is there, “There’s always been potential for RFK to be tier 1. Yes.”
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