Keselowski bad to be good

Annual contender not afraid to rankle rivals to win races.

Brad Keselowski isn’t one of the cool kids.

No one is inviting him over to the motorhome for dinner. No one is asking him to ride shotgun to make a run for beer and snacks while the gang reconvenes in Daytona Beach for Speedweeks. No one is making poetic tributes to him like the ones we read about Jeff Gordon these days.

Keselowski is true to a sport that thrives on a Rebel Yell and the bumpand-grind of sheet metal. That’s his thing, and he is proud of it. The passion is not reciprocal. He looks around for love, and sees only loathing.

“I’m never going to be Dale Jr., and I’m OK with that,” Keselowski said, referring to his friend and the most popular driver in the sport, Dale Earnhardt Jr. “Certainly everybody wants to be popular and I’m no exception to that, but not at the expense of not running well. And for me to run well, I have to challenge the status quo.”

Brad is very good at that. Or is Brad just being very bad?

Keselowski doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the name-calling and occasional takedowns on Twitter. It’s all part of the drama. Grab your popcorn and take a look:

“He’s a dip-(bleep),” Gordon said after their dustup in Texas late last season. “I don’t know how he’s ever won a championship.”

“He’s just out of con- Brad Keselowski (right), with Joey Logano, won the 2012 Sprint Cup title and had five victories last season.“I walk my own path, and ... that makes my success that much more enjoyable,” he says. trol; he’s desperate, obviously,” Denny Hamlin said after their dustup in Charlotte last season.

“It was wicked cool how much Matt tackling Brad looked like an episode of @CopsTV,” Earnhardt tweeted after Keselowski’s dustup with Matt Kenseth in Charlotte last season.

The fear and loathing would be understandable if Keselowski was a parttime hack with a lousy stock car. But as Gordon noted, Keselowski won a Cup title in 2012, has 16 Cup victories in only five full-time seasons, and won six races last year despite not making the Final Four.

But it goes back to the cool kids thing. Keselowski, a Michigan native, compares himself to the seventh-grader who makes it to middle school, only to get picked on by the eighth- and ninth-graders. And then the same thing again, when the sophomores get harassed by the seniors in high school.

“I feel that’s how our sport works,” he said. “With the lack of turnover in our sport over the last decade, even though I may be a champion, I’m still a ninth-grader. I’m still the freshman in high school. Until that turnover comes, in that sense, no high school football player likes to get beat off the varsity team by a freshman.”

There you go. The nerdy freshman with the pimples is not backing down. The NASCAR seniors are still mad at Brad, with a long list of grievances, including the time he got hammered on Miller Lite during a live TV interview celebrating his Cup title.

Disrespectful to the sport made famous by guys who ran moonshine?

Please. Pass the beer, and the popcorn, too.

“When that door is open just a little bit, Dale Earnhardt was willing to stick his nose in there when others weren’t,” said Dale Jarrett, a former Cup champion. “That’s what made him a seven-time champion. And Brad Keselowski is willing to do those same things. And he might ruffle some feathers in doing that. But he is not a dirty driver in any way. He is just an opportunistic driver willing to take that chance.”

Don’t expect to see Brad leaving flowers at anybody’s motorhome in Daytona with the hopes of making nice. There won’t be any rebranding, no Brad Keselowski 2.0.

He knows one speed. One style.

No retreat. No surrender. Deal with it. “I walk my own path, and quite honestly that makes my success that much more enjoyable,” he said.

Does he worry about the inevitable payback?

“If I’m in front of them, I won’t have to worry about that,” he said.

It’s easy to see why the cool kids are jealous.