“Nothing Ever Gets Cheaper”: Brad Keselowski Acquits the Next-Gen Car of Forcing Cup Teams to Lose Money

In contemporary NASCAR, it is not just the burning passion, but the clinking of coins that truly gets your ride on the track. Hopeful car owners would have to shell out a cool $25M-$40M on only one guaranteed starting spot, also known as a charter, for every points-paying race of the season.

Add another 10 million dollars to that amount in annual running costs for a single car, coupled with rampant inflation. And the prospects don’t look too economical for those willing to dare in 2024.

Thankfully, that should assumedly not be too much of a stretch for Brad Keselowski and his buddies at Roush Fenway Keselowski (RFK) Racing, Ford Performance’s longest-tenured partner in NASCAR. But as he revealed very recently on Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour, the reality is quite contrary for RFK, facing an uncertain and constantly evolving ‘NextGen’ racing spectrum. 

Brad Keselowski on the high costs of owning a NASCAR team in 2024

Kevin Harvick, a former team owner in the other two NASCAR National Touring Series, brought these discussions to light over ownership perspective, by referring to the unresolved charter negotiations, and all the buzz it’s been creating lately. As must be common knowledge by now, the current 7-year charter deal will expire at the end of the season. And in light of a new 7.7 billion-dollar broadcast rights deal for NASCAR, teams and the governing body have been back-and-forth in demands over a more equitable deal starting in 2025. 

Although NASCAR has refused permanent charters, race teams still want a bigger share of that fresh media money. Considering the costs of running cars in the highest echelon of stock car racing are reaching an all-time high, that is not exactly too tall of a claim to make. Brad Keselowski says it best to Kevin Harvick. “My point of view is that you know the sport’s very expensive. You know, we have a lot of inflation-related matters that are hitting NASCAR just as they’re hitting everybody else. And you know, the cost to operate a team has never been more expensive,” the #6 owner-driver explained to Harvick at the Happy Hour podcast.

When Keselowski joined Jack Roush and the Fenway Sports Group to form RFK in 2022, it wasn’t just a milestone year for NASCAR, but a tricky one for the global economic background. For starters, inflation was reaching record 40-year highs, as reported by news platforms globally at that time. As for NASCAR, they debuted their brand-new Generation 7 (NextGen) car that year, aimed at producing more on-par racing and cutting costs internally via standardized parts and other such adjustments.

Keselowski confirmed the NextGen car “is a more expensive car.” He also contrastingly opined that “there is no way around it. It has to be, because it’s built by third parties, and those third parties have to make a profit to be in business,” compared to the back in the day when teams had more authority over the machines they were building. For some context, fellow team owner, Denny Hamlin of 23XI Racing once revealed in an anecdote from his Actions Detrimental podcast that the costs of a NextGen car could reach around $350,000.

Harvick follows on his guest’s sentiments to ask him a deserving question: “So do you ever think there’s a road where the car is cheaper?” To which Keselowski refused with his expert lens, “Nothing ever gets cheaper. The challenge that we have, in my eyes, is not a cost challenge for the most part.”

He elaborated on these statements further, citing the common issue of widespread inflation as the bigger evil. “If you look at headcounts in the teams the head counts went down generally 10 to 20%. The problem is inflation hit everybody by another 20. So you kind of nullified all those gains. And then the car costs more… But I don’t know if it’s necessarily fair to blame that on the NextGen car. I honestly think the NextGen car itself was a wash between the difference of third-party versus internal manufacturing,” explained Keselowski. But how do these challenges affect the ensuing charter standoff?

Will the unresolved negotiations find a middle ground?

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According to Keselowski, inflation and its fears “drives the charter negotiation because the teams are just screaming like, we have a huge deficit with our budgets… that kind of puts the whole charter negotiation in this unique place where the teams are are just trying to figure out how are we going to pay for things.”

Since NASCAR CEO & Chairman, Jim France, rejected the idea of permanent team charters, the revenue-sharing model has been a major sticking point in negotiations. Race teams have been demanding 45% of all traditional media revenue compared to the 25% they currently receive as part of the existing media rights deal. Plus a 33% share of any new revenue streams. As per Jenna Fryer of AP, the 15 chartered teams also seek a guaranteed voice in all decision-making procedures.

Nevertheless, Brad Keselowski concluded to shed light on an overlooked issue ranging clouds of doubt over the charter negotiations. As he suggested, “the new TV market and that’s changing almost every day, has put another kind of wrench in that (charter deal). Because the more we move off of broadcast and we move to streaming services and all these other things, the harder it is to kind of, get the partners engaged the way we want to get them engaged.” He also provided insight into the upside of the same situation which quite simply translates to “more money.”

For him “The conversation is mostly about: how do we create a stable platform to where the teams aren’t losing money…” He also informed the NASCAR nation that “there are well-managed teams that are losing money.” If that is the case, there must be a middle ground the sanctioning body has to reach with its teams to guarantee all stakeholders equally/equitably benefit from any outside support.