Brad Keselowski ups his game, tones down the rhetoric
FORT WORTH — If Brad Keselowski seemed incognito during his Sprint Cup title defense last year, the anonymity actually could have been much greater.
The Team Penske driver, who has embraced the unorthodox in establishing himself in NASCAR's premier series, turned down an endorsement opportunity to change his name to an energy drink shot company for the 2013 Daytona 500.
"There's always outside-the-box opportunities, and that's my favorite," Keselowski tells USA TODAY Sports with a laugh. "It was like, 'This is hilarious, and the money is great, but it doesn't fit me at all.' I don't even remember the name of (the company), but it was something hilarious.
"I went through the part where I would have to explain it to (team owner) Roger (Penske), and I couldn't stop laughing imagining Roger's face. It would have been awful."
That's the sort of trouble Keselowski found himself in during his 2011-12 breakout seasons when he made the Chase for the Sprint Cup twice and won the championship. But he also stirred the ire of NASCAR executives and rival teams, most notably in a freewheeling USA TODAY Sports interview on the eve of last season that earned a reprimand from CEO Brian France. After angering Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing with accusations of poaching Penske employees last June, Keselowski grew reticent the rest of 2013, but his results also suffered as his No. 2 Ford missed the Chase.
"I trailed off and toned down and had to get in a shell for a while," he said. "And that was not good for us as a group."
Keselowski, who turned 30 in February, vowed to pick his spots and re-emerge as a less outspoken but still compelling star this season, and the early results are encouraging. He has led six of seven races and earned a provisional spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup with a victory at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Off the track, he has ambitious plans for a series of viral videos (in the vein of rally driver Ken Block's five-part Gymkhana series, which have drawn more than 200 million views on YouTube), is slated to appear in an upcoming edgy video game (Ubisoft's Watch Dogs, a cyberhacker vigilante saga) and has started an introspective and confessional blog on his web site.
As Keselowski tries to maintain a persona that can alternate between iconoclastic, insightful and irreverent, it's about walking a fine line between fan-appealing candor and momentum-killing controversy.
"So far we've walked it very well to start the season," he said. "We have to be cognizant at all times of it."
But there have been conflicting reactions to a more measured approach.
"I'll get feedback that says, 'We miss the outspoken Brad who's on Twitter more than he is now,' " he said. "And then a week later, it'll be, 'You're talking too much.' The world's full of extremes. I think the silent majority is in the middle. I feel like I know I'm doing it right when I hear from both sides -- one too aggressive and another too conservative – at the same time (laughs).
During a sitdown with USA TODAY Sports in his motorhome at Texas Motor Speedway, Keselowski dished on his current and upcoming projects, his 2012 title, the state of his relationship with Kurt Busch and his long-term plan to buy a tank:
Q: What's the goal for a video game endorsement?
A: It was a field that I challenged some of my people to make sure we got into it. I didn't feel there was a lot of membership from other parties in the sport. It wasn't something I was looking at for as much a financial opportunity as more of doing something I thought would be cool. It's a little bit of growing the brand, but mostly just doing something fun and different. I guess that is my brand.
Q: And this is something you'd be doing even if you weren't endorsing it?
A: Oh yeah. I look to do things that are authentic to me, so I like video games a lot. I'm not going to be like Jimmie (Johnson) with a mountain bike endorsement deal, because I don't do mountain bikes. It makes it actually fun and easier to talk about it because you do care.
When I get into a game, I'll usually finish it in a month. There'll be three or four nights of nonstop gaming. Racing lends itself to hurry up and wait, and when it comes time to wait, those are the perfect things to keep your mind and body engaged.
Q: The promotional materials for the game tacitly endorse "street justice" by noting "violence is sometimes best answered with violence." Did you need to get approval from your NASCAR sponsors?
A: No, I don't think we did. We just did it. We're on the forgiveness rather than permission plan. I don't think we're going to have any problem with it. We should be fine. It's a video game, it's not real life. So I think there are some liberties that go with that. It's part of the video game world that you can take out some aggressions that you can't in real life, and that's a good thing.
Q: What other areas and opportunities should NASCAR drivers be pursuing?
A: Well, I have ideas there. I'm trying to temper it because I don't really like to give away my hand. I'm looking really hard at more military connections. I've been working on this piece with Ford, which I haven't really talked about a lot, to do some kind of NASCAR version of Gymkhana (rally driver Ken Block's five-part series, which has drawn more than 200 million views on YouTube.) I'm a long ways out, but I spent a lot of time in L.A. when we were there for the Fontana race, researching it with the marketing and creative teams to pull it off. Putting that together is very time- and labor-intesive, but that's the next foray I want. I see that with the action-sports stars. To some extent, Jeff Gordon did viral videos and had huge success, but his had a lot more advertisement and branding. I'm not really interested in that. I'm more interested in what Ken (Block) was able to do. If I can knock that out in the vision I have for it, it'd be pretty successful.
Q: What's the goal behind the blog?
A: I've always wanted to dabble in writing more. I never had the forum. We kept getting leveraged into doing blogs for other sites. When I did those, I didn't like it. I just didn't feel it. It got edited by someone else, so I never put my heart into it. Those never felt really authentic.
Over the course of the offseason, we had more of those opportunities. So this year, I put my foot down and said no. We're going to do this 100% or 0%, and that's how we got here. Because 100% meant a blog on my own site so I could do it in my own manner.
It's unique and serves multiple purposes. One of the great ones is an opportunity to speak to my team. I never really had a way to outreach. These race teams are massive with 350-something employees. And they have no idea what's going on with me or sometimes even the team. This gave me an opportunity to be able to reach out in a manner that was professional and unscheduled to tell them some stories they may not know about me. Which I think can serve as a motivator for my team in the long haul. It gave me an opportunity to be authentic to our fans and show them the same things. It also gave me an opportunity, with some of the struggles going on in the media world, to fully tell my story. And not rely on different levels of journalism that might not have the interest in telling the full story that I want to tell.
And it works for the NASCAR media because they have the opportunity to take pieces from it and put it in their own stories. In that manner, I don't feel like I'm undercutting the media because they're getting more content at the end of the day. I think it's one of those few situations in life, which I look for a lot, where everybody wins. And in that sense, I'm thrilled with how that's turned out and somewhat shocked I was the first person to do an authentic blog in NASCAR as a driver, at least. Because it can be a very, very powerful tool.
Q: Is it intimidating, too, because you don't have formal training with writing?
A: What makes that work is the way we went about it. I don't type it into the computer. I dictate it, and then I edit it on screen to make sure it's truly my words and have people help me with that. It's everything out of my mouth and structured the way I want it.
For this week's, I sent it to my crew chief to say, 'Are we cool about it?' So I go through all those channels, and it's probably one of the biggest benefits that everyone feels engaged. Because I have a tendency to be very outspoken, it helps me to really decipher how I feel about something. It gives me a chance to realize, 'Well, I said that, but it's not really what I meant. I know how it's going to come out to some people.' So I really like that.
Q: One of your blogs detailed how your once frosty relationship with Carl Edwards had been repaired. Did you get a response from him?
A: No, I don't know if I should have. But I've gotten a lot of feedback in general, mostly from the garage. I feel like the blog, more so than anything I've ever done, has been a voice of the garage, which was shocking to me.
Q: So the person who works in Team Penske's shop but doesn't travel to the track can feel connected?
A: Absolutely. That's exactly the type of feedback I'm getting. We had a party after we won Vegas at the shop with 300-something people. People I don't know stopped and said 'Man, I read what you wrote last week. That was great.' It's just so hard to reach out nowadays
Q: Last week you wrote you had mulled whether your 2012 championship had been 'tarnished' by 'a lot of run-ins' or if they actually had fueled your title. Was that a reference to trying to play mind games with the Hendrick teams about whether they skirted the rules with their cars?
A: Well, that comment stems from a couple of things that Tony Stewart said. I didn't know how to take it, and maybe I took it the wrong way. At Texas in the fall race, I ran really hard with Jimmie, and Tony had gotten out of the car and said something about me having a death wish. And the label was I won the championship by being super aggressive, and it paid off — not by being deservedly so.
And the conversations I had throughout the year about the Hendrick cars, those were aggressive comments. Quite honestly, I think they're what won me the championship in some ways. Because I was able to move the needle from a team perspective to a NASCAR perspective to ensure fair play. And once we got fair play, we were able to run with it.
Q: So you feel what was said about Hendrick forced NASCAR's hand in changing its rear suspension rules but also forced your team's hand to improve your cars, too?
A: Oh, absolutely. It was a dual play.
Q: Based off your blog, is the ball now in Kurt Busch's court after your skirmish at Martinsville Speedway (where the drivers tangled on the track and traded words during and after the March 30 race that Busch eventually won)?
A: I think so, yeah. I reached out to him, and he didn't answer back. That's another reason why it's in his court.
Q: Are you fearful of retribution from him?
A: I haven't thought about it, to be honest. I'm guilty sometimes of putting myself in someone else's shoes and expecting them to react like I would. And then I'm constantly reminded by people that drive with me that not everyone thinks the way I do. I just kind of moved on from it, because there's so much else going on, you don't have time to think about it anyway. You move on without even knowing you had.
Q: Did you and Busch get along well at Team Penske?
A: That's very fair to say.
Q: Do you think there's resentment about how it ended with him leaving the team and you becoming the champion a year later?
A: I've heard rumors to that effect, but only Kurt knows. It's never fair for me to answer for someone else what's in their head. It's a great question for him.
Q: You promised to buy yourself a tank after a Sprint Cup title. What's the latest?
A: (laughing) I need to win a championship and more races. I was this close to getting a tank. I found what I wanted, and I got into a bidding war and lost, and I got unmotivated. That was the one I really wanted and had my heart set on it. I still want to get one, but I've moved on financially. I will definitely get one. It's just a matter of when.
Follow Ryan on Twitter @nateryan