MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Precision is not the first thing one may think about when considering Las Vegas Motor Speedway, but 2012 NASCAR Cup Series champion Brad Keselowski says it is important.
Speaking to the media ahead of Sunday’s race at the 1.5-mile tri-oval, the driver of the No. 6 RFK Racing Ford, talked about the characteristics of succeeding at the Sin City track.
“First off, Vegas takes so much precision. That’s probably the first thing I think about when I think about that race track. You have to really hit your marks.
“Most of the short tracks it’s really important that you hit a lane that’s like within a foot or so in order to be fast, but with most of the bigger tracks that’s not always the case – they give you a little more of a cushion I guess you could say where you still need to be within an area, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be as small of an area.
“I think what stands out to me about Vegas is that it’s a very, very fast track with a very narrow spot that you can run on it because of the bumps and the character that the track has, so you have to be really precise at a fast track. If you’re not precise, then the track will really spit you out. I mean that quite literally.
“One and two, huge bumps over the tunnel and then three and four has got like some ripples in it, so you just have to be really, really precise with how you drive the car,” he continued. “Vegas is a track that just feels very, very fast in the Next Gen car. We won’t have the straightaway speeds that we had with the Gen 6 car, but what makes the Next Gen car hard to drive is it hates rough racetracks. Vegas and Charlotte are two of the roughest race tracks we have that are of the mile-and-a-half variety. It just makes it feel faster because every time you hit one of those bumps it’s just so out of control and on the edge, so the precision that you have to have there is really high and it’s just a gutsy racetrack. When you make a mistake, you can stick in the fence pretty easily.”
Keselowski has run all four races this season and ranks 16th in the standings despite continuing to recover from a broken leg suffered in an offseason skiing accident.
“A lot of PT (physical therapy). I’ve got some great people around me. I actually just came from there to here. That’s why it took me a minute to get on the call. I’m just jamming in all the PT work with some of the best professionals you could hope to work with and I’m building stronger every week, but not as fast as I want to,” Keselowski explained. “Driving the race car is a blessing and a curse.
“It’s a blessing because it provides the motivation for me to really push my rehab and do things faster than normal, which is not a bad thing. But it’s a curse because, yes, when I get in the car it does hurt, it does pull me backwards. When I have the adrenaline and all those things, I don’t really notice it, but when it wears off, yeah, I’ve got to recover from that.
“The long airplane flights to the west coast and the crash on Saturday were not my friends, so I’ll spend most of this week trying to get back to where I was before I left for Phoenix and hopefully by Thursday or Friday before I leave for Vegas, I’ll be ahead of where I was last week and that’s kind of what my weeks have looked like. That’s just my world for hopefully only a few more months, but a reality nonetheless and I’m trying to make it all happen.”