DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The list of things Brian Keselowski needed heading into the Daytona 500 was long and overwhelming. A day after earning a spot in the biggest race of his career, everything Keselowski did not have seemed trivial.

Brian Keselowski was $250,000 in debt, but he will start at No. 12 in the Daytona 500.

“ We’ve already won the Daytona 500,” Keselowski said Friday. “Just getting in was the win.”
A week ago, Keselowski had no idea if he could even afford to come to Daytona International Speedway. His bid to make it in Nascar had left him more than $250,000 in debt, and as a two-man team that consists of Keselowski and his father, they had been able to prepare only one of the six cars in his stable.

“ I figured I had a credit card somewhere with enough room on it to get us down to Daytona,” he said.

So Keselowski, 29, packed up a minivan and headed south with his father and Jen Calandrillo, a budding motorsports reporter Keselowski found online and recruited to do some public relations for him while in Daytona. His uncle Ron flew from Michigan to complete the crew.

Their low-budget adventure received a lift Saturday when Keselowski reached a sponsorship deal with Discount Tire, which also sponsors his 27-year-old brother, Brad, in the Nationwide Series. His team spent the morning applying the company’s logo to his car before practice.

“ It’s awesome,” Keselowski said. “I’ve had a lot of calls and a lot of people I’d really like to work with, but when they called up last night and said Discount Tires was interested, I said, ‘We need to make this happen.’ It’s awesome. They’ve made it happen.”

Keselowski’s situation had been in stark contrast to the ride Brad was enjoying at the other end of Daytona’s vast garage. A budding star and the reigning Nationwide champion, Brad Keselowski has every tool at his disposal with the backing of Penske Racing and Miller Lite.

At times, Keselowski has been jealous of his little brother’s success, wondering why all those breaks never fell his way. But he has never been one to ask for help — until last Thursday’s critical qualifying race.

Keselowski needed to be pushed around the track by his brother, he needed that Penske horsepower, and Brad was all too willing to help. He patiently stayed on his older brother’s bumper for most of the 150-mile race, which was the push he needed to claim one of the open spots in Sunday’s Daytona 500, the Super Bowl of Nascar.

In the wake of making the 500, which will be Brian’s first Sprint Cup Series start, he was learning quickly to accept help.

Offers of assistance were coming in faster than he could field them, including potential sponsorship opportunities for Sunday and a call from the former Nascar crew chief Ray Evernham, who offered to pay Keselowski’s tire bill for the weekend.

But other issues needed immediate attention. The payday Sunday — last place in last year’s race paid $261,424 — means Keselowski can clear his mounting debt and ensure he can try more races. But he needed to find a way to get someone back in North Carolina into his race shop to finish building a car so he would have something ready to take to the next race in Phoenix.
“ No way, no way we’ll have a car ready for Phoenix,” his uncle Ron said. “Impossible.”

Then Ron turned his attention to Calandrillo, insisting that she stay on top of the quest to locate a new front splitter. Keselowski’s was damaged in the qualifying race, and he had lent the other one he had with him to Norm Benning, who damaged his in a wreck.

But Calandrillo was fielding rapid-fire news media requests and trying to solve the most pressing issue: where their five-member team would sleep the rest of Speedweeks.

“ We checked out of our rooms on Thursday because nobody thought we were making the race,” she said. “We thought for sure we were going home. We did the ‘friend of a friend knows somebody in Daytona’ and all crashed at her house last night, but we’re working on something to get us through the rest of the weekend.”

Keselowski was willing to sleep in the minivan if needed.

“ After struggling so long,” he said, “just trying to make it week to week, and now we get to pay our bills and know we can go to another race, this is the first time that’s ever happened to me.”
Keselowski will start 12th in the 500 — four spots ahead of his brother — and plans to race with the help of volunteers who have offered to help him prepare the car and pit.

“ I’m going to race, I know that,” he said. “How? Those are details. Very minor details compared to what it took to get here.”

Daytona last year...

Brian and the K crew went for it all in the run up to the Daytona weekend. They took a cup car - a proven Dodge chassis that once entered Victory Lane at Lowe's in '08 - and pushed into superspeedway / restrictor plate territory. At the wheel, Mike Wallace, as K Automotive made its first attempt to start a Cup Series race for thirty years. It was a bridge too far, but worth the effort.

The real beef was K's entry of three cars into the Nationwide Series opener, with Brian driving his own 26 car, supported by Johnny Chapman and Dennis Setzer aiming to qualify the 92 and 96 cars too. Trouble was, no -one had counted on the Florida weather: The arbitary way NASCAR chose to fill out the field after the rain washed out Friday's qualifying left some teams scratching their heads and some, like K-Automotive and Mears Racing, pretty sore.

The rules were vague, and it became clear that the race lineup would be effectively a lottery. Thirtyfive entries locked in by owner points (even though some of the richer owners had bought those points from defunt 2009 teams) leaving just a few places to be settled on time.

The rain changed all that. Team Keselowski's three entries were suddenly reduced to one, and the hard work was looking wasted. Dennis and Johnny saty it out, but then Brian got busy once the race started.

In the Nationwide Drive4COPD 300 Brian had a worrying strat, almost taken out by an early race incident. But it didn't slow his progress. Mid-race he found himself conserving tires and riding alongside the new darling of NASCAR, Danica Patrick, who was making her first start at NNNS level.

And then the race got serious - and Brian found enough pace to ride along with the leading pack into the home stretch of an eventful race. Final position 11th. A nice end to the toughest of weeks.

In order to make it to the top, you have to be where the action is. That’s the case in any industry, and in the case of NASCAR you have to be in North Carolina. That’s why the Michigan-based K Automotive Racing team has decided to head down South for the 2010 racing season, in hopes that the move will help grow the small family-run team into a Nationwide series contender. MORE

ìI really cannot believe that they look you in the eyes and tell you that the reason youíre not in this race, after you spent every single dime you possibly could, is because somebody drew a number.

It completely eliminates the legitimacy of what weíre doing. I just canít believe we donít even get a chance. Everyone should have an [equal] shot to make the race.î

BRIAN KESELOWSKI, to Tom Bowles of Frontstretch this week.

Interview with Brian K in the Oakland Press: “"There's room for me right now in Nationwide,” he said. “"A guy like me without a lot of money can still succeed and make a living. That's all I do —- racing. I don't have my hands in anything else.

I resign myself to the fact that that stuff isn't going to happen right now. So the only way is to race for myself."” http://tinyurl.com/yevsh3w

2009 Kay Keselowski Interview http://tinyurl.com/yaqvj3k