Brad Keselowski spent last December on crutches after breaking his leg on a family ski trip. He turned every lap of the first three points races of 2026 anyway, and by August he had rebuilt himself into an 11th-place driver who hadn’t finished worse than 20th all season. Then the summer happened, and now the co-owner of RFK Racing needs something close to a miracle just to keep his own team in the conversation for the Cup Series playoffs.
Saturday night’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona is the regular-season finale, the last race before NASCAR sets its 16-driver Chase field. RFK Racing arrived at the track with three cars and three entirely different fates riding on the same 160 laps, a situation that turned a single race weekend into a study of how fast fortune can flip inside one organization.
Three Cars, Three Different Nights
Ryan Preece and Keselowski are both racing for the same handful of remaining playoff spots, and realistically only one of them can get in. Preece sits 31 points behind Shane van Gisbergen for the final transfer spot, a gap that is mathematically closeable without a win. Keselowski’s deficit is far worse at 66 points, a hole that all but requires van Gisbergen to have an early mechanical problem while Keselowski wins the race and leads both stages.
“It’s really important for us that we put our best foot forward,” Keselowski said, a modest way of describing a night where his own championship math depends on somebody else’s bad luck.
Preece’s situation carries a second layer that has nothing to do with his own driving. His No. 60 team sits just six points out of the owner standings’ playoff cutoff, and for a race team, the owner’s side of the ledger is where the money lives. A driver can miss the Chase and still watch his team benefit if the car qualifies on points, which means Preece and his crew are fighting two separate battles inside the same 400 miles.
Chris Buescher, meanwhile, is already locked into the Chase and racing Saturday with nothing to lose. “That is not lost on me,” Buescher said. “It’s certainly rewarding to not be in that situation, to not be right on the bubble, and not have that far of the unknown. I think it was two years that the unknown came from 30th or 31st in points to knock us out. That hurts. So, to have a year that we’ve had that’s been very consistent and very strong in a lot of places, knowing that should put us in the Chase, and we are in the Chase, we don’t have that threat from a racetrack that can produce those wild one-off winners, is certainly nice.”
A Penalty That Widened Preece’s Gap
Preece’s deficit did not build up gradually. NASCAR hit him with a 25-point penalty earlier this season after ruling that he intentionally wrecked Ty Gibbs at Texas Motor Speedway, a call that turned a tight playoff picture into a steeper climb. Without that penalty, Preece would be sitting on the bubble instead of chasing it, a fact that makes Saturday night’s math feel less like a fair fight and more like a debt coming due.
Qualifying only sharpened the divide inside the shop. Buescher lined up on the outside of the front row, the best starting spot of any RFK car and a fitting reflection of his stress-free night ahead. Preece qualified fourth, close enough to the front to give himself a real shot at the win he needs. Keselowski will start 21st, a position that leaves him needing to pass roughly half the field just to put himself in position for the late-race chaos a superspeedway can produce.
The Season That Was Supposed to Be Different
RFK Racing entered the summer with all three cars sitting solidly inside the top 13 in points, a spot the organization had never occupied with all three entries at once since expanding to a third car. Not since 2023 has more than one RFK car made the postseason in the same year. For a few months this season, the team could see a version of history where all three did it together.
Then Preece and Keselowski’s teams both slid backward at close to the same rate, a coincidence that Keselowski, speaking as both driver and co-owner, did not try to soften. “You back up to April and May, we had all three cars pretty solidly in the Chase,” he said. “We had a weak summer, particularly with the six car that was less than ideal. I think there are some key learnings from that, and certainly we won’t stand still on that. We just want to be successful, we want to compete to be a tier one team, and tier one teams put all their cars in the Chase. I don’t think we’re far off from being able to do that, but at some point either you are, or you aren’t, and so we have to make sure we get there.”
That is the voice of a man who has to answer for the summer slump twice: once in the car and once in the shop meeting on Monday. Keselowski has said publicly he has no interest in holding the organization back if stepping aside from driving ever became the right call for the team’s future, a rare admission from a driver who is also signing the checks. Saturday’s result will not settle that question, but a night where his own team’s playoff hopes hinge on his recovery drive from 21st adds weight to it regardless.
What a Miracle Actually Requires
Superspeedway racing gives long-shot bids like Keselowski’s a puncher’s chance that shorter tracks don’t. A single crash in the closing laps can reshuffle half the field, and stage points reward drivers who lead early, points that stay on the board no matter how the finish goes. Keselowski would need to win the race outright and sweep both stages to have any realistic path past a 66-point gap, a combination that has happened at Daytona before but not often enough to bet on.
For Preece, the math is friendlier but still unforgiving. A top-10 run without a win might not be enough on its own if van Gisbergen has a clean night, which means Preece is watching two races at once: his own, and the one happening around the cars he needs to have trouble.
Buescher gets to watch all of it from the comfortable position of a driver with nothing on the line, chasing a win instead of survival. Three teammates, one shop, three completely different Saturday nights, and by Sunday morning RFK Racing will know exactly how many of its cars are still racing for a championship.
An Organization Still Chasing Its First Win of the Kind
RFK Racing has not put more than one car in the Chase in the same season since 2023, and it has never sent all three since expanding to a third full-time entry. That history sits behind every conversation the team has had this summer, and it explains why Keselowski keeps circling back to the word tier one when he talks about where the organization needs to go. A team with three cars capable of running in the top 13 in April and May, only to watch two of them fade by August, is not short on speed. It is short on the consistency that turns a promising spring into a finished season.
Daytona will not fix that gap by itself. But for one night, it gives Keselowski, Preece, and Buescher three separate chances to prove the spring version of RFK Racing was closer to the truth than the summer one, and for a co-owner who has spent the year answering for both, that chance is worth more than the numbers alone suggest.
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