If you’re an actor and someone tells you to “break a leg,” that’s another way of wishing you good luck in your performance. If you’re Brad Keselowski and you’ve got three extremely difficult races ahead of you to start the 2026 NASCAR Cup season, and you actually DID break your leg in an off-season slip and fall on ice, “break a leg” is the last thing he wants to hear.

The 2012 NASCAR Cup champion suffered a completely broken right femur when he slipped on ice in mid-December. While it’s been nearly eight weeks since the mishap, he is still recovering, even using a cane most of the time and occasionally a walker to get around.

He also had to undergo surgery to install a titanium rod and pins to keep his femur together so it can eventually fuse back. He’s still suffering significant pain and lingering nerve damage that causes numbness from his hip to his knee, and he undergoes a grueling six to eight hours of daily rehabilitation to strengthen his leg and increase its mobility.

Obviously, the timing of his accident couldn’t have been worse, but Keselowski, who turned 42 on Thursday, is planning for business as usual. But there are still plenty of questions lingering.

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Questions remain about whether Keselowski can get through the entire Daytona 500 and beyond

How will Keselowski hold up in Sunday’s season-opening Daytona 500? Will he be able to endure the pain? Will the pain get worse the longer the race goes on? Will he have to resort to a replacement driver if the pain becomes overwhelming?

Then, once he gets through Daytona – if he does without causing any additional damage to his broken wing – the co-owner of Roush Fenway Keselowski (RFK) Racing then has to worry about the next two races: the high-speed 1.5-mile oval at Atlanta (Feb. 22) and particularly the twisting road course at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas (March 1).

“When I’m in the car I know I’ve got an injury, don’t get me wrong, but I feel the best in the car,” he said. “The seat is molded to me really well and you get a little adrenaline flowing, so I felt pretty good.”

Given its propensity for large multi-car wrecks, getting through Daytona without further injury is weighing on his mind, but COTA is even more so.

“COTA is a big concern for me,” said Keselowski, who has Joey Hand on standby to fill in for him if the road course becomes too difficult to navigate. “I’ve got two weeks to COTA.

“If I had to run the full race today, I’m not 100 percent sure I could do it, but I’ll have another two weeks of reps and rehab to continue to gain and hopefully I can get there.”

This is the second serious injury Keselowski has suffered during his 17-and-a-half-year Cup career. He suffered a broken left ankle during testing in 2011, the year before he won his only Cup championship.

Can Keselowski do at Daytona what he did at Pocono after a previous injury?

Ironically, four days after that crash, he came back to win his first start afterward at Pocono. But this injury, Keselowski says, is a far different animal.

“This is way more serious,” he said. “When I broke my ankle, that sucked. Don’t get me wrong, it was very painful, but in a couple weeks I was fairly mobile.

“This is a much more significant injury, unfortunately. It’s hard to explain to people that have never broken their femur before what it’s like.

“It’s not the same as breaking your leg below the knee. Your femur is the biggest bone in your body. It’s got a lot of things running through it and it has to heal.

“You can’t really cast it. You can’t do any of those things, so you just kind of have to tough it out. A normal broken leg is eight to 12 weeks. This is more like six months (for full recovery), so it’s just totally different.”

Keselowski will race for the next several weeks with extra padding in the cockpit, particularly adjacent to his leg.

“We kind of have a pretty good sense for what I could do before (Thursday’s Duel qualifying race) and what I can do now and it’s a very small difference,” he said. “I feel good about that.”

If Keselowski had broken the femur in his left leg, things likely wouldn’t have been as bad for him, although the left leg is also the same leg he uses to operate the clutch in his No. 6 Castrol Ford Mustang Dark Horse.

So far, it’s been so good for Keselowski. While he intentionally dropped out of last week’s Cook Out Clash to allow more healing time, he qualified and will start Sunday’s Great American Race from the ninth position.

Thursday’s duel was a good warmup for the 500

And in this past Thursday’s Duel race, even though its overall length is roughly a third of how long the 500 will be, Keselowski finished an impressive fourth in his particular heat.

“(The Duel was) a tremendous indicator of what I’ll have for Sunday,” he said. “Thankfully, the way this race week works you get these little bites and doses and each one of them a little more intense and we can get a good feel for it.”

Even though the pain has subsided, its memory is still a constant reminder.

“It was by far the worst pain I’ve ever went through,” Keselowski said. “I’m eight weeks (into his recovery) and about three to five weeks in, there was a question of if I was gonna walk again, let alone drive a race car.

“Those were the thoughts that were going through my mind. I was confident I was gonna put the work in and I was gonna own whatever result there was.

“There was certainly a lot of moments where you’re like, ‘Oooh, this isn’t a layup.’ About that week four, week five, I made some pretty big steps and progress quite literally, but, again, I didn’t know until I got in the car what it was gonna be. Until you get in a race car going 190 miles an hour, you don’t know how it’s gonna feel.”

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In addition to his broken leg, Keselowski has last season on his mind. He endured one of the worst seasons of his career, failing to win a race and also missing the NASCAR Cup playoffs for only the third time in his Cup tenure.

“I don’t want to miss a race and this is what I do. I love it. Tough isn’t what you say, it’s what you do, so I guess we’ll find out how I make it through this whole process, but what matters to me is not a label.

“What matters to me is being able to run this race and having a shot to win. That’s what I care about. If I felt like I was holding the team back from giving my best effort and having a chance to win the race, I would get out.”