NASCAR Nationwide Series: Ford 300

Topics:  Ford 300

Brad Keselowski
October 16, 2013

HOMESTEAD, FLORIDA

THE MODERATOR: We're joined now by our third place finisher in the tonight's Ford 300 and that's Brad Keselowski. He drives the No. 88 Navy Chevrolet for J.R. Motorsports. You had a successful season in this series and closed it out with a good finish here tonight. Your thoughts?
BRAD KESELOWSKI: Yeah, a lot of thoughts. It's been awesome, it's been a special year, it really has. It's been everything I could have asked for and more. So it was cool to get two wins. I had a lot of fun, got a great group of guys and building momentum and going to try and make a run for the championship and celebrate like Clint it right now for next year. But it's been a very special season, kind of a bittersweet day for me to see it end. Last race for the Navy.
This was the last race for the Navy, so I'm going to miss that and all that comes with it. That was pretty much our day, and it's been a great year.

Q. Brad, you were in championship contention a few races ago but fell out. What did you learn from the last part of the year to maybe help out with a championship run next year?
BRAD KESELOWSKI: Ooh, a lot of things. With the way the points system is, it takes a whole year, and I think if you ask Carl right now, he'll tell you the same thing.
There are multiple things, you know, California was really mean to us, really mean to us. We lost 220, 230 points at California alone. Both Californias and both Richmonds kind of stunk. You just can't have bad finishes. I felt like if you look at our stats this year, you know, and our performance, we've been just as competitive, if not more than Clint has, but Clint has just done such a great job of executing at the end of the day, and so has his team, not having any failures and all that.
Quite honestly, my team did a great job, too, and just caught some bad breaks. That's racing. You know, you have to do more than do everything right, you have to have a little bit of luck. But there's probably room to improve all the way around, room for me to improve, room for the team to improve and room for the luck to improve, and we're just the tiniest bit off on each bit. I'm just a tiny bit off, the team is just a tiny bit off, the luck is just a tiny bit off, and if we can put all that together next year, we can go win it.

Q. What personally are you going to do to get ready for next year? What are some of the things that you want to see either about yourself or the team in order to be in a position to challenge, say, Carl or Clint if he runs again next year?
BRAD KESELOWSKI: That's a great question. I'm going to run the Nationwide series full-time next year and probably do some kind of limited part-time schedule next year on the Cup side, very small amount of races to be determined. I think just work hard on the preparation.
Running double duty has helped my performance drastically on the Nationwide side, and even though the cars are different, it's huge, it really is. It's huge to be able to run that other car. It gets you thinking, it gets you physically prepared, mentally prepared. So there's definitely an advantage to that, and I'm probably going to try to exploit that as much as I can.
To be able to run with Carl next year, I think he'll probably be the guy to beat if he wasn't this year. To run with him, we're going to have to go out there and win races. I think Carl won six races on the Nationwide series and we won two, and I would expect Carl to win about the same next year.
So we have to win a few more races and got to execute, and there was probably three or four races where we had an opportunity to win and just missed that last little bit.
So next year we just need to execute that, and I myself will review those instances and try not to let those happen again, and that'll probably be the bulk of how I try to prepare to do that. It just comes down to the small things at the end of the day, you know, the last pit stop or all those small intangible things that a lot of people don't see that just keep you from -- that separates a seventh-place day from a winning day.