Brad Keselowski: Reduction of Practice Hasn't Reduced Costs for Teams

During a media availability on Tuesday at the NASCAR Production Studios, Brad Keselowski weighed in on practice, or rather the lackthereof, currently in the NASCAR Cup Series.

During the COVID pandemic, NASCAR reduced, and for a while eliminated practice altogether in an effort to keep the sport rolling after a shutdown that lasted for a few months in the early portion of the pandemic. After the COVID pandemic simmered down, NASCAR kept a very lean practice schedule as an attempt to push cost savings to race teams.

Keselowski says that while the intention for a minimal practice schedule was to reduce costs, he hasn't seen that the changes have done that in the NASCAR Cup Series.

"I haven't seen how we've saved any money getting rid of practice, not from a team perspective," Keselowski admitted. "Maybe there were some savings other places in the industry that I'm not aware of. But there hasn't been a significant cost savings. We've reallocated in a lot of way to other demands, and its hard for me to understand the value proposition today to not have practice."

When asked if he would champion adding additional practice time, Keselowski said, "Yeah, I'm more than comfortable with it. I would say I'm an advocate for it."

The elimination of practice forced teams, RFK Racing included, to go all-in on simulation models for their cars in an effort to bridge the gap for less real-world practice time. The costs for the teams have been just as much, if not more, than the costs incurred for actual practice.

"We put a lot of money and time into race car simulation. Whether that's simulating the car statically with how it would perform aerodynamically in consideration to other things or whether its kind of a multi-body physics model, which is simulating the car going around the track. So very dynamically," Keselowski explained. "We continue to make a lot of investments, and we're not the only ones. Really, everybody is making those investments. Although, I hesitate to say we wouldn't want to still keep those in a practice environment, there's undoubtedly the conclusion that we wouldn't have had to invest so heavily had we not lost practice. I feel like it's never a good idea for our sport, when in cost consideration mode, move spending away from things that our spectators can enjoy and view or media can cover or discuss and move into areas that they cannot. I think if you look at the allocation of resources, that is what happened."

Keselowski detailing the re-allocation of funds from the reduction of practice into simulators, which essentially replaced practice, was eye-opening

Photo Credit: Rusty Jarrett, NKP, Courtesy of Ford Performance