Keselowski Pushing Through Pain, Physical Therapy to Stay Competitive

Four races into the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season, Brad Keselowski finds himself above the Chase for the Cup cutline. The fact that the driver of the No. 6 RFK Racing Ford is there is a testament to his ability to fight through physical therapy every week, following a broken femur in the offseason, as much as the speed of his racecar and the performance of his race team.

Keselowski, 42, who has utilized a cane for stability while walking in the garage area so far this season, says he has been adding as much physical therapy as he humanly can into his schedule to help further gain strength and mobility in his leg.

“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," Keselowski explained in a Ford Racing media teleconference, "but not as fast as I want to."

For Keselowski, driving a racecar for a living is a blessing and a curse when it comes to his injury. The driver says on one hand, it has helped motivate him to push harder in his rehab, but on the other, his leg really takes a lot of stress inside the car.

"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," Keselowski explained. "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."

In addition to physical therapy, Keselowski has had to continually go under the X-ray machine to make sure that his surgically repaired leg is continuing to hold up under the rigors of NASCAR Cup Series racing.

"I’m trying not to be over-the-top about it," Keselowski said of the X-rays, "but I’ve got a lot of hardware in my leg that’s holding it together, and if that hardware were to come loose, it would be problematic for me at this time. The surgeons and everybody that did it did such an incredible job that that hasn’t been the case. I’m knocking on the wood right here that it stays that way, and I’ll keep checking.”

There's an old adage that says winning is the best medicine. Thankfully, for Keselowski, this week he heads into Las Vegas Motor Speedway, a track that he has found victory lane at thrice in his NASCAR Cup Series career. A fourth win would probably make that leg feel quite a bit better.

However, while he has three wins in his back pocket at LVMS, Keselowski isn't resting on his laurels heading into the weekend, as he hasn't captured a win in Sin City since the 2018 season. Keselowski knows that if he is to add a fourth piece of Vegas hardware to his mantle, he's going to have to hit his marks in Sunday's Pennzoil 400.

"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," Keselowski noted.

Keselowski 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 that it hates rough racetracks. Vegas and Charlotte are two of the roughest racetracks 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.”

In 25 career starts at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Keselowski has registered three wins, nine top-five finishes, and 14 top-10s. Keselowski's 361 laps led at Las Vegas trail only Kyle Larson (819), Joey Logano (585), and Denny Hamlin (421) for the most laps led among active drivers.

Last season, Keselowski recorded finishes of 11th and 10th at the 1.5-mile facility. He'll look to take a step forward this time around, and if all goes well, he'll help position himself further inside the top-16 of the championship standings.

The NASCAR Cup Series Pennzoil 400 presented by Jiffy Lube at Las Vegas Motor Speedway is scheduled for Sunday, March 15 and will be televised on FS1 with television coverage set to begin at 4:00 PM ET. The Performance Racing Network and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide the radio broadcast of the race.