{"id":52731,"date":"2025-06-09T16:15:01","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T21:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/?p=52731"},"modified":"2025-06-13T13:29:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T18:29:29","slug":"rfk-racing-roars-back-with-season-best-showing-at-michigan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/09\/rfk-racing-roars-back-with-season-best-showing-at-michigan\/","title":{"rendered":"RFK Racing Roars Back with Season-Best Showing at Michigan"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Holly Cain, NASCAR Wire Service<\/em><\/p>\n

Rightly so, Sunday\u2019s race winner Denny Hamlin celebrated his dramatic victory in Sunday\u2019s FireKeepers Casino 400 at Michigan International Speedway with a huge burnout and even a wink-wink tease to those in the massive crowd who booed the Toyota driver\u2019s clutch win in Detroit.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Chris Buescher. (Photo by Meg Oliphant\/Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

But as significant as Hamlin\u2019s third win of the season was \u2013 the 57th of his NASCAR Hall of Fame bound career \u2013 the driver that finished runner-up to him had some legitimate reason to feel good too. In fact, Chris Buescher\u2019s entire Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing team took Sunday\u2019s checkered flag with some legitimate good vibes.<\/p>\n

Buescher\u2019s runner-up finish in the No. 17 RFK Racing Ford was his best showing of the season. And for the first time this year, all three of the RFK Ford Mustangs finished in the top-10 in a race.<\/p>\n

It was exactly the kind of summer-swing boost the team needed as it heads to toward the final 11 regular season races to set the 16-driver Playoff grid.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was such a fast Kroger\/Heinz Ford Mustang, I really appreciate everybody on this team working so hard to put us in this situation and to have a chance to win,” said Buescher, the 2023 Michigan race winner.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Chris Buescher. (Photo by Jonathan Bachman\/Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI\u2019m disappointed I didn\u2019t get it done. It\u2019s on me. I had a couple different decisions I would love to go back and make and ultimately should have had us ahead of the 11. We were faster on the day and I didn\u2019t do a good enough job. We\u2019ll certainly take the good with it. We certainly need a little bit of good luck or fortune on our side.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt hurts right now, but certainly there\u2019s a ton of positive out of today,” he continued. \u201cOur car was so fast here from the time we unloaded off the truck yesterday. I\u2019m certainly proud of that and excited for what we have to come, but there\u2019s a little bit of a sting right now to be that close and miss out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Buescher\u2019s took a self-critical assessment of his day in the immediate moments after climbing out of his car on pit road Sunday, looking at the big picture, Michigan represented a significant step forward for the team.<\/p>\n

His teammate Ryan Preece finished ninth, the third top-10 in the last four races and sixth of the season. Owner-driver Brad Keselowski finished just behind in 10th-place for his second top-10 of the year \u2013 both coming in just the last three weeks, however.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a really good car,” Keselowski said. \u201cI felt like we had a top two or three car and just didn\u2019t get to see it through. I\u2019m really disappointed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe kind of crushed ourselves on pit road with the speeding penalty and then having to go around the 45 and the 71. Every time we pitted we would lose a lot of spots. It wasn\u2019t the pit crew\u2019s fault, we just needed a better pit stall. I\u2019m not really sure on the speeding penalty. I felt I was way slow, so getting called fast didn\u2019t really add up, but we had the speed to do a lot more than we did today and I\u2019m disappointed to not get that. Still, we\u2019re reasonably happy with a top 10.\u201d<\/p>\n

The difference Sunday is that the drivers were disappointed because they were justifiably competitive. And that\u2019s a step forward for a team that carries perpetual and legitimate high expectations.<\/p>\n

Buescher is currently 14th in the Playoff standings 20 points to the good on the 16-driver Playoff grid. Preece is tied for 16th with Kyle Busch, but holds that final position \u201cto the good\u201d based on a higher race finish this season. Keselowski, whose had a rough start to the year, is ranked 32nd and will likely need a victory in these next 11 races to ensure his chance for a title run.<\/p>\n

The series now moves to Mexico City for the inaugural race, the Viva Mexico 250 (3 p.m. ET on Amazon Prime, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at the world-renowned Autodromo Hermanos Rodriquez road course. And there is reason for RFK to be optimistic.<\/p>\n

Not only is this a first-time event for the entire field \u2013 an equalizer in itself – but Buescher, Preece and Keselowski are proficient road course racers. Buescher is the defending Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International race winner and has six top-five finishes on road or street courses. Preece has a pair of top-10s on road courses and Keselowski has seven top-10s over the course of his championship career.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in this stretch of races where we\u2019ve won at a few of these things,” Buescher said. \u201cWe\u2019ve run really strong at a lot of others. We\u2019re gonna get in the summer where it\u2019s gonna get hot and we\u2019re gonna start catching a few drivers off guard here or there.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, there\u2019s a lot of good racetracks coming up for some good racing for us, selfishly at RFK and probably some good ones for some other teams as well. We\u2019ll see where it all plays out, but I guess, for us, I don\u2019t think we have any racetracks on the schedule that we don\u2019t feel good about. One, it\u2019s fun to have that mindset and not have to head into a race weekend just hoping to get through it, and that comes from fast race cars.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Holly Cain, NASCAR Wire Service Rightly so, Sunday\u2019s race winner Denny Hamlin celebrated his dramatic victory in Sunday\u2019s FireKeepers Casino 400 at Michigan International Speedway with a huge burnout and even a wink-wink tease to those in the massive crowd who booed the Toyota driver\u2019s clutch win in Detroit. But as significant as Hamlin\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":676,"featured_media":47722,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[166,219,16,1104],"class_list":["post-52731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nascar","tag-chris-buescher","tag-michigan-international-speedway","tag-nascar","tag-rfk-racing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/racedaysa.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/GettyImages-2167438046-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7hzTZ-dIv","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/676"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52731"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52744,"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52731\/revisions\/52744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}