{"id":120033,"date":"2025-08-05T05:10:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T05:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/120033\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T05:10:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T05:10:09","slug":"despite-missed-opportunity-nascar-insiders-offer-playoff-hope-for-brad-keselowski-ryan-preece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/120033\/","title":{"rendered":"Despite missed opportunity, NASCAR insiders offer playoff hope for Brad Keselowski, Ryan Preece"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brad Keselowski<\/strong> and Ryan Preece<\/strong> had great runs in Sunday\u2019s Iowa Corn 350 at Iowa Speedway. Keselowski finished third, while Preece followed with a fifth-place finish. <\/p>\n

Both, however, remain below the playoff cutline with three regular season races remaining. But whereas Preece is just 23 points below, Keselowski is still well off the pace. Jordan Bianchi<\/strong> of The Athletic sees an avenue where at least one of them could sneak into the postseason, albeit by different outcomes. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, Brad and Ryan are in two different categories,\u201d Bianchi said on The Teardown<\/a> podcast. \u201cRyan can still theoretically point his way into the playoffs. We don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen with upset winners, that kind of thing. But he\u2019s still in a spot where he could still conceivably point his way in. While yeah, it would have been great to have that win \u2014 first career win, punch that playoff ticket \u2014 you still had a good points day and with three races left in the regular season, you\u2019re still in the game, whereas Brad \u2014 as great as he\u2019s run the last 10-12 races \u2014 you\u2019re not going to make up that point difference. That is just not going to happen. It\u2019s win or go home for him, and that\u2019s why I think this hurts more for him than Ryan Preece.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re Brad, you\u2019re looking at this like, \u2018Man, what can we do. We won two stages today, got a bunch of points and that\u2019s great. Who cares. Like, we\u2019re still not going to make the playoffs unless we find a way to win one of these next three races.\u2019 By the way, one of those last three races is on a road course, where Brad\u2019s never won on before. So, conceivably, he\u2019s only got Richmond and Daytona. He\u2019s great at Daytona. You would think they could extrapolate what they learned at Iowa and apply it to Richmond, but you don\u2019t know for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brad Keselowski, Ryan Preece fast at Iowa <\/p>\n

Both Keselowski and Preece were in contention throughout the race at Iowa, but it was the former who had arguably the best car in the field. Keselowski won Stages 1 and 2, picking up his first playoff points of the\u00a0NASCAR<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0Cup Series season. Unfortunately for Keselowski, there was no stages sweep. The caution-filled Stage 3 allowed drivers such as\u00a0William Byron<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Chase Briscoe<\/strong>\u00a0to make it to the end of the race on fuel despite pitting well outside the window.<\/p>\n

This was a great day for Brad Keselowski. He had arguably the fastest car in the field, leading 68 laps and accumulating a race-high 55 points. But at this point in the campaign, that doesn\u2019t matter much for Keselowski. He needs to win to qualify for the postseason. Preece might be in that category as well, and Jeff Gluck<\/strong> likes their chances in the Aug. 16 race at Richmond Raceway.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do like their chances of figuring something out for Richmond because you had two great cars today with both Preece and Keselowski,\u201d Gluck said. \u201c\u2026 At one point, it sounded like the spotter talking to the crew chief on the second channel, not Preece, but someone came over the channel and said, \u2018Hey, if we use this setup for Richmond, we just need to do this tweak and this tweak.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it was Preece saying that, but they were already like, \u2018OK, we have something to work with here.\u2019 It wouldn\u2019t take that much of a tweak \u2014 Ryan Preece is a great short track racer.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brad Keselowski and Ryan Preece had great runs in Sunday\u2019s Iowa Corn 350 at Iowa Speedway. Keselowski finished…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":120034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[1406,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-120033","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-nascar","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114974439795515110","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}