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Brad Keselowski discusses his first job and his cellphone habits,
Q: If NASCAR allowed you to listen to music while you were racing, would you want to?
A: No. I remember when I was testing at Daytona when I’d first gotten the ride with JR Motorsports, and Dale (Earnhardt) Jr. had the earplugs for all that. I thought, “Oh, that might be a good idea.” And I was like this close.
And then I thought about it, and I was like, “What would my team guys think if I was listening to music in the car because I was bored?” It felt like that would be really demotivating to them, and they’d feel like I didn’t care. So I’d feel too guilty.
Q: Where did your first paycheck come from?
A: It would have been from my dad’s race team.
Q: What were you doing?
A: Anything. They let me sweep floors, and I ended up mowing the grass a lot and mopping. I think I made like $20 a day, which was a lot of money when I was 16. I had to work 8 to 5 every day in the summer.
One of my favorite stories about that is they had this really small trash can. Almost everyone in the race shop except my family chewed tobacco, and they’d all spit in the trash can, and they had terrible aim, and it’d always be on the side of the trash can. And I’d have to take the trash out to the dumpster. I’d be like, “Ugh!” It just was gross.
Anyway, the trash only got picked up once a month. Race teams are fairly dirty, and once a month was not enough to keep the dumpster from overflowing. They used to have these big cardboard boxes, and I’d save them and put them in last, because you could jump on top of them and crush them down to fit the last garbage in.
I remember being 15 or 16 years old in the dumpster, jumping on the boxes, and there’d be spit and chew all over everything. There were scraps of metal, and you’d be like barely dodging them to not get cut open.
So I remember asking my mom and dad: “Could we maybe get the trash picked up once every two weeks instead of once a month, so I don’t have to get in the dumpster and jump on everything?” They’re like, “No, no, son. You don’t know how expensive that is.”
I just kind of took that answer as fact, like if a parent tells their kid, “The ice cream store is closed.” You just take their word for it when they’re clearly lying.
Anyway, when I got my own race team going, somehow the question came up about garbage. And I saw how much it actually costs: It’s $19 a month or something like that and $35 to get it picked up twice! I was like, “Are you (freaking) kidding me? I jumped in trash and chewing tobacco and risked losing my foot for two whole summers for like $15?” (Laughs.)
I guess it was good for me. My parents must have known that.
Q: This next question is probably the most obvious one you’ve ever been asked: Do people ever accuse you of being addicted to your phone?
A: (Laughs.) Yep! Pretty much everyone I know.
Q: Would you agree with them?
The thing about addiction is it usually has negative connotations, and I feel like I take more positives away from my phone than I do negatives.
People think anytime I’m on my phone I’m on Twitter, which is kind of depressing to me at times. Like I’m just randomly tweeting a fan every time I’m on it? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy that. But a lot of times, I’m reading.
I own a lot of books, but the majority of reading I do is not in a book — it’s on my phone. I barely use my computer; everything is on my phone. Whether it’s emails, reading books or magazines, I do almost everything on my phone.
So I feel like people mistake that for something other than what it is.
Q: Here’s another ques- tion that’s perfect for you: What’s your preferred method of dealing with an angry driver after a race?
A: I feel like you might have written a few of these for me. (Laughs.) First of all, I’ll say I’m not sure I have the perfect answer for this. But I know what my approach is, and my first approach is always to put myself in that person’s shoes and go from there.
If they have a legitimate reason to be angry, I would talk to them about it and maybe concede that I could have handled something better. And if they don’t have a legitimate reason to be angry, I’m going to tell them that.
Understanding those situations are usually emotionally charged and not full of a lot of rationale; I’m probably going to try to interject some rationale into it. Be honest — at least with myself; that’s all you’ve got.
But other than that, we’re still not curing cancer. So I don’t ever feel too bad when a race car driver has a bad day — even myself — because who wants to hear a race car driver complain about having a bad day? Every day in the sport is not going to be a great day, and I have to get over it — and so do others sometimes.
Q: Some people might not always appreciate that you interject your rationale, though, because essentially, they have an opinion and you’re telling them their opinion is wrong.
A: Yeah, that’s fine. That’s their right to have an opinion, but it doesn’t mean they are right. I’m not going to apologize when I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong.
Q: If you had a time machine and you could travel to any year and race, where would you go?
A: Probably the early 2000s. I don’t think a lot of the drivers who were around in that era realized how good they had it. One of the things we talk about a lot is work-to-life balance. With any job, it’s a critical measuring tool. That’s how much you work vs. how much life time you have vs. how much you make. And at that time in the sport, it was the best work-to-life balance a driver could ever have.
The drivers at that point in time were making a lot of money, they had very few commitments, and the sport had a lot of positive energy.
I wish I was around in that era. I don’t think those who were around in that era realized it was probably the best anyone has ever had it in the sport.
Right now, the money side of it is still very good. But it’s been offset by a lot more demands (on time). So the work-to-life balance is quite a bit poorer than it was then. It would have been awesome to make the money I make now but still have the free time those guys had back then.
To carry that further, because people love to compare the sport to the past, 20 years ago those guys made a lot less money but they had tons more free time. Tons. The early ’90s? They got to do some really cool stuff, because they had so much free time. We don’t get to do that now.