Like a chef looking for the final elusive ingredient to make a perfect meal, Brad Keselowski is a man looking for a missing link, one that he hopes to find this weekend in Las Vegas.

The link the Michigan native is in search of is how to win again in the NASCAR Cup. Of his 36 career wins in the NASCAR Cup Series, 35 came while Keselowski drove for Roger Penske. But since he left Team Penske at the end of 2021 and accepted a part-ownership of Roush-Fenway Racing in 2022, Keselowski’s recipe for success has gone flat.

In just over four years as a tri-owner of Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing – a grand total of 178 starts – like a beaten and battered race car, the driver of the No. 6 number RFK Racing Ford Mustang Dark Horse has fallen into a tailspin that he just can’t seem to pull out of.

Since his first season with RFR in 2022, Keselowski has endured the largest struggle and lowest winning average of his Cup career. In 178 starts since joining forces with veteran team co-owners Jack Roush and John Henry, Keselowski has managed just one win.

He’s hoping to finally be able to change that dismal performance record and win for the fourth time in his Cup career at Las Vegas in Sunday’s Pennzoil 400. Sin City has been one of the better tracks for Keselowski: in 25 Cup starts there, he has three wins (2014, 2016 and 2018), nine top fives and 14 top 10 finishes.

Keselowski’s last Cup win was the spring 2024 race at Darlington. Since then, he’s gone 63 straight races without a return visit to victory lane. One might think that’s the longest winless streak for the 2012 Cup champion in his career, but on the contrary. He went 110 races without a win between his last victory for Team Penske in 2021 and his first and only win with RFK at Darlington in 2024.

Do the math, and that means Keselowski has managed just one win in his last 173 Cup starts.

In the first four races of the current season, Keselowski ended the season-opening Daytona 500 with a strong fifth-place finish, followed by 17 at Atlanta, 20 at COTA, and 15 last week at Phoenix. He enters Las Vegas 16 in the Cup standings.

While many believe the 1.5-mile oval at Las Vegas is one of the best tracks on the Cup circuit, it’s also one of the most challenging, Keselowski said.

“Vegas takes so much precision,” Keselowski said. “That’s probably the first thing I think about when I think about that racetrack is, you have to really hit your marks.

“What stands out to me about Vegas is that it’s a very, very fast track with a very, very, very narrow spot that you can run on because of the bumps and the different things the character of the track has.

“So you have to be really precise at a fast track. And if you’re not precise, the track will really spit you out. I mean that quite literally.

“One two, huge bumps over the tunnel and then three and four, it’s got like some ripples in it. So you just got to be really, really precise with how you drive the car. And it feels like Vegas is a track that just feels very, very fast in the next-gen car.

“What makes the next-gen car hard to drive is it hates rough racetracks. And when Vegas is mirrored in Charlotte are two of the roughest racetracks we have that are the mile and a half variety, it just makes it feel bad. Because the car, every time you get one, the precision you have to have there is really high.”

As if Las Vegas isn’t hard enough to navigate when a driver is fully healthy, Keselowski continues to be hampered by the after-effects of the broken femur, which he suffered while slipping on ice during a family vacation in Colorado in mid-December. While he certainly could make a quicker recovery if he weren’t racing, it’s a necessary evil since Keselowski did not want to take any time off at the beginning of the season.

So his recovery has been like two steps forward, one step back after each of the first four races. The 42-year-old makes progress during several physical therapy stints each week, but racing actually causes him to be sore for the next several days afterward, leading to his therapy being as important about subsiding the new pain he gets after each race.

“I’m just jamming in all the PT (physical therapy) work with some of the best professionals you could hope to work with,” said Keselowski, who spends much of his time walking with a cane to maintain balance. “And I’m building stronger every week, but not as fast as I want to.

“Driving the race car is the blessing and the curse. It’s the blessing because it provides the motivation for me to really push my rehab and do things faster than normal, which is not a bad thing. But it’s a curse because, yes, when I get in the car, it does hurt. It does pull me backwards.

“When I have the adrenaline and all those things, I don’t particularly notice it. But when it wears off, yeah, I’ve got to recover from that. A long airplane flight to the West Coast and the crash on Saturday were not my friends.

“So I’ll spend most of this week trying to get back to where I was before I left for Phoenix and hopefully by Thursday or Friday before I leave for Vegas, I’ll be ahead of where I was last week. And that’s kind of what my weeks have looked like. So that’s just my rule for hopefully only a few more months (of therapy and rehab).”

Keselowski has a good feeling that he, as well as his teammates, Chris Buescher and Ryan Preece, are all ready to win at Las Vegas.

“We want to break out,” he said. “My goal for the year is for RFK to win five races (this season). We need more speed to do that. I think all three teams have ran really smart races. I’m really proud of that. I’m proud that our cars aren’t falling apart. We’ve got some great mechanics and great work going on. Our pit stops have been, across all three teams, really strong.

“We’re at a very high level. If we can just find some pace, we need to find a little bit of pace. I think the 12 car race is the fastest. I like the moves the drivers are making. I just remove myself. I like the moves the drivers are making. I like the pit stops. I like how the cars stay together. I like the strategy. We just need pace. If we can develop a little bit of pace, I think we can be a very dangerous team.

“And I don’t feel like we really need to be more aggressive because pace isn’t there for that to really pay off. I think we need to be more aggressive with finding pace, but I’m really happy.”

But he’ll be even happier if he, Buescher or Preece find that same pace that leads to one of them finding their way to victory lane on Sunday.