- Brad Keselowski and crew chief Jeremy Bullins have parted ways after less than two full seasons together, with Mike Skarbowski stepping into the No. 6 pit box starting at Kansas.
- The split arrives with Keselowski sitting 18th in Cup Series points and missing the postseason for a second straight year, a stretch that has tested the driver-owner’s patience with his own team.
- Both sides called the departure amicable, but the timing, in the middle of a playoff season RFK Racing is watching from the outside, tells a different story about where the team stands.
A Handshake That Didn’t Hold
Brad Keselowski hired Jeremy Bullins in the winter of 2025 the way old friends reunite after years apart. The two had worked together at Team Penske, where Bullins helped build a pit box that produced ten Cup Series wins, half of them during Keselowski’s own championship run in 2020 and 2021. When Bullins agreed to leave the manufacturer that made his name and join Keselowski’s ownership group at RFK Racing, it read like a reunion built to last. Instead, it lasted twenty months.
RFK Racing announced the split on a Monday in September, framing it in the soft language teams reach for when a relationship ends without a villain. “We’re excited for Jeremy and his family as he embarks on a new opportunity,” the team said in a statement. “Jeremy has been a terrific teammate, leader, and vital member of our competition think tank. Not only has he been a trusted voice with the No. 6 team, but he’s also brought great value to the garage in sharing strategic insights and historical perspective as we’ve crafted a shared vision for RFK Racing’s on-track success. We wish Jeremy nothing but the best.”
Keselowski’s own statement carried less warmth and more resignation. “I am very appreciative of all the work and effort Jeremy Bullins put into the No. 6 car as my crew chief in the past two seasons,” he said. No mention of a shared vision. No mention of what comes next between the two men personally. Just gratitude, offered the way a person thanks someone for a job that didn’t quite get finished.
The Numbers Behind the Handshake
Strip away the diplomacy and the record explains the decision. Keselowski sits 18th in the Cup Series standings with the 2026 season winding toward its final stretch, and he has now missed the playoffs in back-to-back years for a driver who won a championship in 2012 and has 35 career Cup wins to his name. For most drivers, that resume buys patience. For a driver who also co-owns the team writing his paychecks, it buys something closer to self-scrutiny.
Keselowski became a co-owner of RFK Racing in 2021, taking an equity stake alongside Jack Roush and turning himself into both the man behind the wheel and one of the men signing off on personnel decisions. That dual role has made every slow stretch of his career harder to separate from the business he helps run. When a hired driver struggles, a team can point to circumstance. When an owner-driver struggles, the conversation about what isn’t working starts in the mirror.
Mike Skarbowski takes over the No. 6 Ford beginning with Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway, promoted from within rather than brought in from a rival shop. RFK has not detailed what, specifically, it wants different about the way the car is built or the way strategy gets called on Sundays. The team’s public language leaned on words like “strategic insights” and “historical perspective,” praise that reads more like an obituary for a partnership than a diagnosis of what went wrong.
What This Says About RFK Racing Heading Into 2027
The crew chief change lands at an inconvenient moment for a team still building its identity. RFK Racing has spent recent seasons trying to close the gap on NASCAR’s superteams, and Keselowski has been candid in the past about the frustration of watching organizations like Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing pull away on resources most single-car or two-car operations cannot match. A mid-playoff shake-up in his own pit box is not the kind of headline a team wants during a season when its other cars, Chris Buescher and Ryan Preece, have shown flashes of the competitiveness Keselowski is still chasing.
There’s a version of this story where the coaching change works. Skarbowski knows the shop, knows the personnel, and inherits a driver who has already won everywhere NASCAR races. There’s another version where this becomes the first of several changes RFK makes as it tries to figure out why an owner with a championship pedigree keeps missing the playoffs his own team sets up to make. Keselowski turns 42 in February. The window for him to add a second title, as both driver and owner, is not open forever, and this crew chief change is the clearest signal yet that he knows it.
A Reunion That Never Quite Clicked
What makes the Bullins departure sting is the story it was supposed to tell. Two men who built wins together at the sport’s most decorated organization, reunited at a team Keselowski was building in his own image, chasing one more run at the top together. Instead, the reunion produced no wins during Bullins’ tenure atop the box and two missed playoff fields. Racing rarely cares about the sentiment behind a pairing. It cares about lap times, pit calls, and finishing positions, and on all three fronts, the numbers never arrived.
Keselowski has not said whether the change reflects a shift in how the car is being built, how strategy gets called, or simply a need for a different voice in his ear on Sundays. What he has made clear, through the timing alone, is that waiting for 2027 to fix a problem visible in September was not an option he was willing to accept. For a driver who has spent his career being blunt about what NASCAR needs to fix, applying that same bluntness to his own team was, in the end, inevitable.
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