Penske Racing’s Brad Keselowski, not worried about making enemies

Brad Keselowski has run just 17 Sprint Cup races and is entering his first full season in NASCAR’s biggest series.

Yet Keselowski might already be the most hated driver in NASCAR, at least in the garage, where he has stirred up a mess of trouble over the last two years.

As a result, he has earned his share of disdain from the grandstands as well.

But here’s the thing you need to know about NASCAR’s newest star: He really doesn’t care.

And he doesn’t plan on changing.

“I really don’t want to be the villain,” he says. “I haven’t set out to walk out the door and get booed, that’s not something that I would take any pride in.

“[But] by the same token, I don’t think that you can spend your life looking over your shoulder and [worrying about] making every fan happy with what you do, because you’re not.”

Having landed a full-time ride at Penske Racing, Keselowski enters the 2010 season as one of NASCAR’s most exciting drivers. At 25, he already has more buzz surrounding him than any young driver since the arrival of Kyle Busch.

And he is already one of the sport’s most controversial characters, having drawn the ire of such stars as Busch, Carl Edwards and Denny Hamlin. He bumped and banged his way to four wins in the Nationwide Series last year, but ruffled more than a few feathers along the way.

Hamlin grew so tired of Keselowski’s antics that he vowed to get even – and he did, intentionally wrecking Keselowski in the season finale at Homestead.

Though the two bumped into each other a few times during the off-season, Hamlin makes no secret of his disdain for his archrival.

“I feel like I’ve probably given him more press than he deserves,” Hamlin says.

Keselowski enters his first full Cup season with a reputation as an overly aggressive driver who will do whatever it takes to win a race and who backs down from no one.

He proved that last year when he stood his ground during a furious last-lap duel with Edwards at Talladega. His tenacity led to a stunning upset, but the ensuing contact triggered an incident that sent Edwards’ car flying into the fence.

Though friendly, engaging and intelligent, Keselowski is also brash and cocky, and he carries himself with a swagger that says he knows where he’s going and he’s in a hurry to get there. He also appears to have the talent to back it up.

Ironically, he is part Edwards, part Hamlin and part Kyle Busch – the three drivers he has mixed it up with most often.

“He’s kind of like myself, I guess,” says Busch, who has made his share of enemies on the track and in the grandstands.

“He always wants to go out there and do the best he can and try to win, and he’s made a lot of enemies along the way, as I guess I have, and he hasn’t done a whole lot to smooth any of those over. We’ll see what happens this year. Hopefully, he has learned a little bit and can move forward in knowing what he needs to do to be a better, harder, faster, cleaner racer.”

Keselowski joins a successful, multicar organization that has put Kurt Busch in the Chase in two of the past three seasons, but he is driving for a team that has struggled in recent years. Whether he succeeds may not depend as much on what he does behind the wheel as on whom he riles on the track and what he does in the garage to smooth things over and earn respect from his peers.

“Brad has a lot to learn,” says Dale Earnhardt Jr., Keselowski’s former team owner in the Nationwide Series. “He’s a rookie coming into the sport. I’ve never met a rookie yet that’s known it all. He’ll learn his lessons.”

Or else.

“What he did in Nationwide may be different than what his approach will be in the Cup Series,” says veteran Tony Stewart. “You evaluate it when you’re around him. If he needs it, he’ll get it just like everybody else does.”

Keselowski understands and acknowledges the furor he has caused, yet he makes no apologies.

Despite being called onto the carpet and shoved into the wall, he isn’t backing down and refuses to alter his balls-to-the-wall, take-no-prisoners approach.

“My attitude towards racing is to do what it takes to win. I’d prefer to win honorably. I can’t always say that I’ve done that,” he says, smiling.

“Hopefully we can put together strong enough cars this year to where we can win without drama. A goal of mine is to win a race and look back and nobody say, ‘He screwed me over to do it.’ That’s the way race-car drivers are – we never get beat fairly, just ask us.”

Though he knows he has some fences to mend, he doesn’t seem too concerned about earning the respect of other drivers, as most young drivers set out to do. Instead, he says respect is a “two-faced part of the sport.”

“It’s so hard to come into this sport and run well when you’re worried about making everyone else happy,” he says. “I just don’t see how you can do that, because in competitive sports, anytime your competitors are happy with you is when they’re beating you.

“That’s why a lot of the established drivers don’t like young drivers coming into the sport, because there is an upset to that balance. Before, that ride wasn’t a ride that they had to worry about and now it is. Realistically, it’s that they don’t want to race that guy.”

In a dangerous sport in which drivers constantly preach the virtues of give and take, Keselowski says he’s not worried about his reputation as a driver who takes more than he gives.

“I feel like I give when it’s the right time to give and I take when it’s the right time to take,” he says. “For the most part I always do that. There have been a few races during the season where I step back and say, ‘Whoa, I did a terrible job of not giving right there.’ There have been a few [races] where I’ve given too much.

“But at the end of the day, when I look my team in the eyes, I want to be able to say that I took more than I gave. I want to be able to look at them and for them to know that when I got out of that race car, I left nothing on the table, I never gave up a spot that I shouldn’t have.

“If you have to make a few competitors mad along the way, that’s just part of it.”

Ironically, Keselowski enters the sport at a time when NASCAR is looking for more characters to stir things up. It is encouraging drivers to react with more emotion and show more personality.

NASCAR is doing it’s part by loosening the reigns on drivers, allowing them to be more aggressive on the track and to police themselves, up to a point, when it comes to on-track incidents.

That would seem to play right into the hands of Keselowski.

Asked if NASCAR’s new approach favors him, he laughs and says, “I actually did those things already last year. I’m not sure how much that I can change. I’m already right there for the most part.”

Keselowski says that when he met with NASCAR officials last year at Phoenix after another run-in with Hamlin, they told him they were OK with his aggressive driving style.

“The sport’s going through a transition. The mere fact that NASCAR has made some of the changes they’ve made over the year is an acceptance of that,” he says. “As to whether I’ll be one of the key players in that remains to be seen. I’d like to do everything I can to be that guy.”

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