Brad Keselowski and the #6 team are now in a hole after being issued a 100-point penalty by NASCAR, and they face an uphill battle to get into the playoffs.
On the Thursday following the first race at the newly repaved and reconfigured Atlanta Motor Speedway, NASCAR made good on their preseason promise to impose hefty penalties for rules violations this year.
RFK Racing driver and co-owner Brad Keselowski and his #6 team were docked 100 driver and owner points and 10 playoff points. Crew chief Matt McCall was suspended for four races and fined $100,000 for modifying a part on the car that came from a vendor.
The L2-level penalty drops Keselowski from 16th to 35th place in the point standings, 34 points behind Live Fast Motorsports’ B.J. McLeod in 30th. Even with a race win, drivers must finish inside the top 30 in the regular season point standings to qualify for the playoffs.
He is also 104 points back of Richard Childress Racing’s Tyler Reddick in 15th, the last driver currently in a playoff position.
The #6 team fell to 36th place in the owner standings.
While the road to the playoffs and a second Cup Series title has gotten a lot harder for the 2012 champion, the steep penalty doesn’t make it impossible for Keselowski to get into the 16-car postseason.
Here is how he can make that happen.
Method No. 1 – Successfully appeal the penalty
RFK Racing’s quickest, and very likely easiest, way back to getting into the playoffs is simply to appeal the penalty. Any penalty that NASCAR issues can always be challenged by the affected team(s) to the National Motorsports Appeals Panel.
The panel can elect to uphold Keselowski’s penalty in part or whole or overturn the penalty completely. Full overturns aren’t common, and given how rarely the panel overturns only a portions of penalties, it’s most likely that this penalty will be upheld.
But if RFK Racing can shift the panel’s perspective to see this penalty as too harsh, there is potential for RFK Racing to regain some of the valuable points they lost. If they are unsatisfied with the outcome, they would have the opportunity to appeal the decision to the final appeals officer.
A penalty this massive may not be so quick and easy to come to a decision on, so if appealed, it could still be a few weeks before any potential amendment is made to the penalty and reflected in the official point standings.
Method No. 2 – Win a race
If RFK Racing do not appeal the penalty or do not get the penalty overturned, the playoff situation for Brad Keselowski and the #6 team looks much more dire, but there is plenty of time for that to change. Keselowski could lock himself into the playoffs by winning at least one race between now and the end of the regular season.
While winning may seem like a tall task most weeks for RFK Racing, which haven’t collected a points-paying win since July 2017, it certainly isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Keselowski and teammate Chris Buescher each won their Daytona 500 qualifying race earlier this season and Keselowski led 67 laps in the Daytona 500, the most of any driver in the race.
The Cup Series is set to return to Daytona International Speedway in August for the regular season finale, and fellow superspeedway Talladega Superspeedway, where Keselowski has six wins, is scheduled to host a race in April.
The Cup Series also plans to use the superspeedway aero package and engine package when the series returns to Atlanta Motor Speedway in July. Those three tracks should present Keselowski with his best opportunities to win.
With the Next Gen car and all of the parity that it has produced, it is very possible that Keselowski could win on any given week, especially at tracks where he has won before, including Pocono Raceway, Kansas Speedway, Dover Motor Speedway, Charlotte Motor Speedway, New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Richmond Raceway, Martinsville Speedway, and Darlington Raceway.
Should Keselowski win a race, he would still have to end the regular season in 30th place or better in the point standings to be playoff eligible. But this is a very achievable goal when you consider the fact that the penalty only put Keselowski only 34 points behind 30th, a gap that could be overcome in a single race weekend.
Method No. 3 – Point his way in
If Brad Keselowski and the #6 team cannot successfully appeal the penalty and cannot win a race during the regular season, they’ll have to be as close to perfect as they possibly can be. They’ll have to avoid putting themselves in situations that could lead to DNFs and they’ll have to be as aggressive as possible to collect as many stage points as they can.
Keselowski is no stranger to the strategy game, so pit road calls could be used to advance his position on-track to capture these points. Even still, it would be an uphill battle to overcome the 104-point deficit he faces to Tyler Reddick.
Five races into the season, Tyler Reddick has 126 points, good for an average of 25.2 per race. If Reddick continues to gain this average until the end of the regular season, he will end the regular season with 655 points.
Keselowski, in turn, would have to gain an average of 30.1 points each week for the rest of the regular season in order to match that total.
Drivers near the playoff bubble increasing their average points gain per race and at least one more driver from outside of the top 16 earning a win would stress the #6 team even further. But 30 points can be achieved in many ways with stage points.
This penalty could ultimately turn out to be what keeps Keselowski out of the playoffs in his first season as an owner-driver in the NASCAR Cup Series; he hasn’t missed the playoffs since 2013. But there is also a possibility that this could be the start of an incredible comeback story that defines the season and defines RFK Racing for years to come.