Sports
Brad Keselowski Bought Into NASCAR Ownership So He Could Never Get Fired
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
Brad Keselowski is being removed from RFK Racing as its driver and potentially as a co-owner, which is the kind of outcome that would have been easier and cheaper to avoid by simply not buying the team in the first place.
For context: Keselowski joined RFK as a partner and driver in 2022, which in theory meant he owned part of the organization that employed him. In practice it meant he spent three years paying for the privilege of being told he is not working out.
This is not a firing. This is something worse. A firing happens to an employee. What is happening to Keselowski is a restructuring of an asset he personally capitalized, which is the business world's way of saying they are using his own money to show him the door.
Jack Roush, 82 years old and apparently still very much in charge of who gets to be in charge, was reached for comment through a spokesperson who said he was, quote, focused on the future of the organization. The future of the organization does not include the man whose initial is the middle letter of the organization's name. The K is now purely decorative.
Keselowski, for his part, has not publicly said much, which is the correct move when the alternative is explaining to a reporter how you negotiated yourself into a corner where you can be fired from a job you are also paying for. There is no good sentence for that. There is no decent paragraph for it either.
The remaining question is what happens to the ownership stake, which is the part of this story that separates it from a normal NASCAR driver situation and puts it somewhere between a divorce proceeding and a very specific cautionary tale they should be teaching in sports business programs.
If Keselowski exits as an owner too, he will have successfully funded a NASCAR operation, driven for it for three seasons, and then handed the whole thing back in roughly the same condition as a rental car he is not getting the deposit on.
Somebody at RFK is going to sit in that ownership seat. It will not be Brad. The K on the letterhead will remain.
This is what happens when you invest in your own leverage and the other guys turn out to have more of it.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nascar/brad-keselowski-out-driver-possibly-owner-rfk