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NASCAR Nationwide Series
NNS: Fighting Back
Brad Keselowski is returning to the track where he scored his first victory last year...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted April 09, 2009   Charlotte, NC
Brad Keselowski got his first seat time in a Penske Racing Dodge this week at Daytona. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
It would not be an understatement to say that Brad Keselowski is disappointed with how his 2009 NASCAR Nationwide Series started off. But lately, he’s shown he’s still got plenty of fight left in him.
Brad Keselowski got his first seat time in a Penske Racing Dodge this week at Daytona.(Photo: LAT Photographic)

Keselowski, driver of the No. 88 Chevrolet for JR Motorsports, finished third in the Nationwide point standings last year and was expected to contend for the title this season. In his first three races, though, he never once cracked the top 20 and was 22nd in points after the last of those events.

Then came Bristol Motor Speedway, where Keselowski delivered a solid 12th-place finish, which he followed up with a season’s-best third-place run at Texas Motor Speedway last season. Suddenly, Keselowski is seventh in points with the series rolling into Nashville Superspeedway, where he won his first NNS race just last season.

And that has the Rochester Hills, Mich., native jazzed up about this weekend and his chances of getting back in the championship hunt. “We haven't gotten the finishes we deserve, but we've ran extremely competitive, and that's encouraging,” said Keselowski, who is 231 points behind Carl Edwards. “I feel like we had tools. You know, we've had a couple of bad races there, and if you just eliminated one of those bad races, we'd be third in points. So we'd be right where I feel like we can run every week and run with Kyle (Busch) and Carl and them.”

More to the point, perhaps, Keselowski is trying to get the big picture in mind. “You know, it's trying to stay focused on the long haul here,” he said. “It's a long season, and, you know, it's tough because you try not to get down knowing that we've got 29 races or something like that, which is a lot of races. But there's no Chase (for the Sprint Cup) in the NASCAR Nationwide Series. Every week is important. It was a shame to give up the first few weeks with bad finishes. But it was encouraging to run competitively and know that if we could have just finished where we ran all day, we'd be right there where we want to be.”

And where he wants to be, this week especially, is back in victory lane. “I think we can go there and repeat what we did last June,” Keselowski said of his 2008 Nashville victory. “We've got the effort to do that, the car to do that. We've made some gains here in the last few weeks, which are encouraging to me to go to Nashville. So we'll see.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED,” and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association. Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com. Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to

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