Playoff driver Brad Keselowski isn’t a consummate dirt-tracker, but he believes that sort of mentality may be necessary to win Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway (2:30 p.m. ET on NBC, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Kansas offers multiple racing lanes, and Keselowski, who starts 4th Sunday, expects the race winner will have to be able to negotiate all of them.
“To win the race on Sunday, you’re going to have to be able to be good in all the lanes,” said Keselowski, a two-time victor at the 1.5-mile track. “When you catch lapped traffic and get in dirty air, you’re going to lose so much speed that, if you can’t find another lane to run in, you’ll get passed by someone behind you.
“You need to be good in all the lanes, and we were able to do that here in the spring (when Keselowski picked up his second win). It’s hard to do, because the cars drive differently in all the lanes. The cars have really big splitters on them, and they’re very sensitive to how high off the ground they are. One of the biggest things that impacts them is the load off the corners. When you run different lanes, the aerodynamics change dramatically and the handling changes. You can have a car that is really loose on the bottom of the track and maybe be really tight on the top of the track.
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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