Brad Keselowski missed the 2026 Chase. The two drivers he built the RFK Racing program for are both in it. On September 29, RFK confirmed he would be gone after this season. When Chris Buescher and Ryan Preece were asked about it, neither one started with the seat.
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“Brad’s worn a lot of different hats in front of me. Whether it’s the friend side of it, the owner side of it, the teammate side of it. You’d have a really hard time saying it’s just one thing. His knowledge and expertise through the years has been instrumental in helping me continue to improve,” Buescher said in an interview with Matt Weaver.
Buescher was already at Roush Fenway Racing when Keselowski came in 2021 as a minority co-owner with a leadership role on competition. The team rebranded as RFK Racing for 2022. Both drivers finished outside the top 20 that year, but the work underneath was building.
By 2023, Buescher had three wins and a 7th-place championship finish. Keselowski jumped from 24th to 8th in points. By 2024, both cars were winning. Keselowski took the Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway and Buescher won at Watkins Glen International later that season.
Ryan Preece joined RFK in 2025 after Stewart-Haas Racing shut its Cup operation. He missed the 2025 playoffs by 66 points. In August 2026, Preece won the Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway, coming back from 31 points down to take the final Chase berth. When he talks about what changed inside RFK, he points to the same person Buescher did.
“Within our sport, it can be challenging because it’s a data-driven sport. What data does a driver have to provide that his car is not doing what he wants? It’s words. Brad has created an environment that if the car wasn’t doing what the driver needed it to do, that he allowed you to speak up,” Preece told Matt Weaver.
NASCAR cars produce enormous amounts of telemetry. Engineers track throttle, braking, tire temperatures, and wheel speeds on every lap. None of that captures what a driver feels when a car unsettles through a corner. That still needs words. Preece says Keselowski made sure those words counted. “Brad gave me the confidence to speak up again. I had that a long time ago. It’s nice to have it again,” he added.
RFK had been building its technical side around this same culture. The RFK TeK Alliance launched in 2024, centered on data, engineering, and vehicle dynamics. Trimble joined in 2025, and AVL RACETECH came aboard in early 2026. Keselowski sat at the center of that project. He was pushing for better simulation tools and making sure drivers could still push back against what the data said.
But despite the hard work and the grind, RFK Racing isn’t a tier-1 team in NASCAR. Interestingly, Front Row Motorsports shares that tag in the Ford camp, but RFK Racing doesn’t. And Keselowski placed Hendrick Motorsports, Team Penske, and Joe Gibbs Racing above them.
He said the team still needed more speed and investment. Eight days before the split was confirmed, his crew chief Jeremy Bullins had already left the No. 6 for a new opportunity. RFK needs a new driver, a new head of competition, and is still pursuing a third charter for 2027.
Filling the No. 6 is the easy part of this puzzle. Finding someone who can run competition and still make drivers feel heard above the data is a different job entirely. Keselowski himself said RFK was not finished. He just will not be around when they get there.