After claiming his third consecutive front row start in the Sprint Cup Series, Las Vegas winner Brad Keselowski jokingly claimed there was “black magic” behind his early mastery of NASCAR’s new knockout qualifying format.
It may sound as good an explanation as any to some in the Cup garage, as Keselowski narrowly missed knocking Denny Hamlin off the pole for Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway by three one-thousandths of a second.
The P2 performance goes along with his outside pole one week ago at Vegas and his pole position two weeks ago at Phoenix.
“I don’t think it’s complicated – if you’re fast, you’re fast,” Keselowski said to reporters at Bristol. “It shows through and I think Denny would say the same thing. He’s got a fast race car and when that’s the case, this qualifying format’s really easy.
“There’s no trickery to it. You just go out and put a lap down, and I think that’s been the case for us.”
His Team Penske compadre, Joey Logano, also continued his own solid work with the knockout format today. Logano will line up fourth on the outside of Row 2 and just behind Keselowski.
The Penske duo has emerged as Ford’s standard bearers early on in the 2014 season, and Keselowski chalked that up to multiple things such as an updated lower front nose piece on the Fusion.
“I think that was a pretty significant change for us – I think we can point to a half-dozen races where [the nose piece] had a severe negative effect on Ford performance,” he said. “So that’s probably the biggest one that stands out, just getting back to an even playing field with that front [nose piece]. But then again there’s more to it than that. There’s a lot of small things that add up.
“The Roush-Yates engine shop has made some gains this year, that’s something we’re proud of. And Team Penske has made some gains on the car side. I feel like we finished 2013 very strong and with those strong improvements, we’re even better for 2014.”
Keselowski also credited NASCAR for making changes to their qualifying format which allowed teams to use cool-down units on pit road instead of having drivers run potentially dangerous slow laps to cool engines.
“That rule change has just made qualifying even better,” he said. “It’s removed danger and replaced it with opportunity, which I think is a positive. I’m very happy with that rule as it stands right now.
“It doesn’t matter what I say. We qualified well and everyone’s gonna say, ‘Of course you’re happy with it!’ But I think that was for the betterment of the sport, certainly…Being able to go out there and make multiple runs is now a lot more plausible because of that scenario. That’s something that rewards the fans and the teams as well.”
