Brad Keselowski in awe of Chase Briscoe's potential

Watching on TV, Keselowski saw only what the broadcast offered him with respect to video of the finish. That's all viewers at home saw, too. The last shot the broadcast showed before going off the air had the nose of Briscoe's truck slightly ahead of eventual winner Christopher Bell's.

As Briscoe’s team owner, Keselowski was more than slightly invested in the outcome. NASCAR subsequently provided a photo at the moment of caution that showed Bell's Toyota ahead.

“It was frustrating,” Keselowski said. “Once I kind of saw the facts and our team was presented the facts it made a lot more sense. It’s just unfortunate that those facts weren’t available to everyone in the timeliest of manners, but it is what it is. You can’t go back in time.”

Composed and talented

But if Friday's race didn't produce a win for the rookie driver, it did provide ample evidence of Briscoe's talent. As a fellow third-generation racer, Keselowski feels the 22-year-old Briscoe, who won the ARCA title last year before he was recruited to drive the No. 29 Cooper Standard Ford F150, is far beyond his own level of development at the same age.

“He’s one of those guys that I look at and I go, ‘Wow.’ I wish I was as composed. I wish I was as talented as he is at his age,”

Keselowski told Motorsport.com. “You never know with young drivers where they’re going to go. I had the luxury this past Thursday of doing a charity event for my foundation. I sat next to (University of Michigan Football) coach Jim Harbaugh and we were telling this story about they’re in the middle of their pre-season spring training and so forth.

"We’re telling the story of athletes, and you never know which ones are gonna be great and you think you know, and how sometimes you’ll have a five-star and if you look at the five-star recruits, a lot of them don’t ever make it to the pros. And then you look at some of the guys that do make it to the pros that are maybe one-star or no-star at all in high school, and we’re kind of talking through why that is. How does that happen?

“I looked over at coach and I said, ‘I’ll still never forget when I was first getting starting in racing and there was this article that came out and it was the Top 50 prospects or something of that nature and I didn’t even make the list.’"

The article motivated the driver to prove the pundits wrong.

"Every year would go by and I’d progress a little bit and someone would fall off the map and someone would fall off the map until I won the championship, and no one else on that list did," Keselowski recounted. "It felt pretty damn good, and I told him, ‘The only thing I can tell you is young drivers, young athletes, young professionals, they’re dynamic.

"Who they are today is not who they’re going to be tomorrow, and the ones that are able to grow, building confidence, building skill set, and have the work ethic passion, talent and etcetera to do so are the ones that make it, so there are some guys that start off with loads of natural talent, but they don’t have the other characteristics that you need to really grow on that and make something of it.”

Keselowski competed in just three ARCA races during his stock car development. Most of his experience came cutting his teeth in Late Models then racing for his family’s team in the Camping World Truck Series before Dale Earnhardt Jr. recruited him to race for JR Motorsports in 2008. That same season, Keselowski began paying it forward by recruiting young drivers then affording them the same opportunity he was given. Ryan Blaney is a prime example.

Briscoe was racing before he had a driver’s license. Open-wheel dirt racing was the family tradition. Prior to running the K&N Pro Series with Bill McAnally in 2013, he had little experience on pavement. Over the next three years, he honed his stock car skill, finally earning the chance to race with Cunningham Motorsports last season.

The intangibles

On Friday at Texas, Briscoe scored a career-high second-place finish and his third top-five in seven truck starts. Keselowski sees a lot of himself in the rookie driver. He can’t wait to see how Briscoe blossoms in NASCAR.

“Chase, to me, is one of those guys who has loads of natural talent, but he also has the intangibles to grow with it, to take it to the next level and to not just rest on his talents,” Keselowski said.

“So, to me, I look at him and I think he’s a future Cup driver. That’s what I see out of him. I hate to say that in the media because I want him to think he’s a zero-star prospect so he’ll continue to work, and he still has a lot of work to do, but if he stays with his current attitude and combination with his talent level that he starts off with, he has the opportunity to be a Cup level driver in the next two or three years.

“I’m really happy for him. I think Ford’s got a good one through their Driver Development Program to make something of.”