LONG POND, Pa. — In a season mired by myriad disappointments, a top-10 finish for Brad Keselowski and the No. 6 RFK Racing team should be celebrated.
Instead, the driver/team co-owner and his crew chief Jeremy Bullins left Pocono Raceway with a tinge of heartbreak Sunday evening with a ninth-place result that they believe should have been even better if not for mid-race miscommunications.
MORE: Race results | In-Season Challenge matchups set
Keselowski, the 2012 Cup Series champion, led a season-high 27 laps and seemed primely positioned for a breakout day. The statistics from NASCAR Insights bore that out too: Keselowski earned the No. 1 Passer Rating in The Great American Getaway 400 on Sunday and ranked No. 3 in Restart Rating with the fourth-best Speed Rating and Defense Rating, respectively.
Two crucial mistakes, however, ultimately took Keselowski out of contention for a season-changing victory.
“This is the story of 2025 for us,” Bullins told NASCAR.com. “We’ve had some really, really good race cars. Today was probably one of the better ones, if not the best one. Just got to keep doing it, right? Just got to keep pushing, keep making our cars better and try to capitalize when they’re that good.”
The first error came at Lap 57 during the second caution of the afternoon when Keselowski pitted from the lead while the pits were closed, incurring a penalty that forced Keselowski to restart from the rear of the field at Lap 61.
“This is my fault, let me just be clear with this,” Keselowski told Prime Video on its post-race show. “We held pit road (closed under caution) every pit cycle for three laps. Normally, they hold pit road for one lap. So when you get to lap two, it’s just an automatic pit. So when we were going down the short chute, the team said, ‘pit this time,‘ and I had no reason to challenge them. Ultimately, I hold the steering wheel and I‘m the one that‘s got to check. I didn‘t check the crew chief and the spotter, and that‘s my fault.”
The second hiccup was less of a mistake and more of a driver-led gamble that backfired. Entering the final expected cycle of green-flag pit stops inside the final 45 laps, Keselowski had worked his way back into the top 10 before leaders like Chase Briscoe, Denny Hamlin and Chris Buescher — Keselowski‘s RFK Racing teammate — peeled off the track.
Bullins wanted Keselowski to pit at Lap 124 with 36 laps remaining, four laps after Briscoe and three after Hamlin and Buescher. But Keselowski wanted to stay out an extra lap, cycling to the lead and utilizing the clean air in front of him and build a gap to his competition.
“I’m just a big believer (that) you can’t win by doing the same thing everybody else does,” Keselowski said. “You’ve got to be better than them and you can’t be better if you’re the same. So, we were in a little bit of a hole there and were trying to dig out of it and we were well positioned.”
But a Lap 125 caution for Shane van Gisbergen‘s spin exiting Turn 1 derailed their strategy. The race‘s prior leaders returned to the front of the field when Keselowski and a handful of others made their stops under the yellow flag.
“I‘ve got to give credit to my crew chief, Jeremy Bullins,” Keselowski said. “He asked me to pit the lap before and I was in a clean air spot and I wanted to keep running, taking advantage of my tires. If I would have pitted the yellow came out while we were on pit road, we probably would have cycled inside the top 10 with new tires. Might have had a shot to win a race, so I feel bad about not taking advantage of that.”
As a result, Keselowski restarted 24th, deep in traffic with 30 laps remaining. The day‘s best passer put that to the test over the final 75 miles, carving his way to ninth place by the checkered flag‘s wave for the team‘s second-best result of 2025. There was little jubilation over that bright spot though. With a quick enough vehicle to fight for a victory — which would vault the No. 6 team from 30th in points into the 16-driver Cup Series Playoffs — the results don’t reflect what could have been.
“We were really good in clean air once we got to the lead and ran one lap too many,” Bullins said. “We were debating whether or not we should pit the lap before. Stayed out one lap too many and the caution came out and trapped us again. Just one of those days where had a great car and nothing to show for it.”
There is still significant trust within the team itself, Sunday’s disappointment aside. After spending 2024 with Harrison Burton at Wood Brothers Racing, Bullins joined RFK in the offseason, reuniting with Keselowski with whom he served as crew chief at Team Penske in 2020-21 and collected five wins together. A rash of poor finishes and a stat line of zero wins, one top five and three top 10s in 17 starts have not undone their rekindling thanks to strong leadership both inside and outside the car, in part from Keselowski and in part from Bullins and others surrounding the program.
“I think everybody on this team is a really strong source of that,” said Bullins, a 10-time winner in Cup competition. “I think everybody kept their cool. We could have really lost our mind and imploded there, but we stayed together and put ourselves back in position before the last caution hurt us again. And I mean, at the end of the day, we still managed to get back to the top 10. So we drove from the back to the top 10 twice, at least, if not more. I lost count.
“But yeah, really fast car.”
Their next opportunity to break through for the organization’s first win of 2025 comes Saturday at EchoPark Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway) at 7 p.m. ET on TNT Sports, truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. The Quaker State 400 marks the opening round of the inaugural In-Season Challenge, in which No. 17 seed Keselowski will pair against fierce rival No. 16 Kyle Busch in the 32-driver, elimination-style tournament that will consume the next five weeks and award $1 million to the winning driver.
IN-SEASON CHALLENGE: Full bracket, information and more
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