Before going into Sunday’s Chase for the Sprint Cup opener at Chicagoland Speedway, Brad Keselowski explained what capturing a second Sprint Cup championship would mean to him on his definitely-worth-a-bookmark blog.
In addition to honoring his team’s efforts for him and earning a craved status as a leader for the sport, Keselowski also mentioned the matter of finally gaining the respect he feels he has not received even though he defeated perhaps the greatest stock car driver of the current era, Jimmie Johnson, to win his first Cup title in 2012.
He wrote:
“It probably sounds crazy, but even after we won the Cup championship in 2012, I felt like we didn’t get credit for it a lot of the time. It baffled me. In two years, we had taken a 35th place Cup team and transformed it into a champion. But there was always someone ready to say, “You only won because of pit strategy,” or a bunch of other things that basically meant, “You didn’t deserve to win. It was a fluke.”
There are two ways to quiet those types of people. The first is to ignore them, which is certainly a virtue, but not one I’m particularly good at practicing.
The other is to win another championship.”
On Sunday, Keselowski took a big step toward that second championship by winning at Chicagoland and advancing on to the Contender Round in the Chase.
But what will help drive Keselowski all the way to Homestead – the experience from having already reached the top or the hunger that burns inside him to accomplish all of those aforementioned goals?
The NASCAR AMERICA gang pondered that question today, and you can hear what they had to say in the clip above.
