May 4, 2022 | By Lee Spencer

Chris Buescher finds opportunity with new car and new teammate at RFK

There was an unexpected driver leading the Ford charge last weekend at Dover Motor Speedway. 

And the driver wasn’t from Team Penske or Stewart-Haas Racing. 

Chris Buescher started the weekend as the fastest Mustang driver in the Ford camp after winning his first career pole. When the DuraMAX Drydene 400 finally ended on Monday, the 29-year-old Texan topped the Blue Oval campaigners with an eighth-place result. 

“For us, we’ve had some good momentum for this season,” Buescher said. “We’ve been building up steadily, but probably a little bit slower than what we would like. That was definitely a bigger step to have that speed off the truck, which is something we feel like we’ve been chasing a little bit. It’s become very important with such a limited amount of practice, and then qualifying has become very important as well with some of these races that have been a surprisingly amount of track-position sensitive.  

“It was definitely a pretty awesome weekend for us. We didn’t get that win we need to really swing that momentum over, but very good progress nonetheless.”

No doubt bringing former champion Brad Keselowski to re-imagined Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing has been an asset to the organization. It’s been eight years since the team formerly known as Roush Fenway Racing has had the benefit of an A-list driver still relatively in his prime.

“It’s been really neat to see Brad come in and obviously have a little bit more skin in the game than most of your typical teammates would,” Buescher said of the new co-owner. “It’s been fun to learn from. A lot of Brad’s experience from his truck team, from his advance manufacturing company that he’s operating, a lot of that is coming into play as he’s come over to RFK and applied some of that. 

“It’s been neat to see him and Jack work so well together. I think they have a ton of similarities the more I’m around them I start to see a lot of each other in both of them, so that’s been neat to see and it’s been working out really well.”

Not only does Keselowski provide Buescher with a measuring stick to rate his performance, but his experience from being groomed by Roger Penske along with 35 Cup wins also elevates his value to the team.  

“I’ve been able to lean on Brad,” Buescher said. “I think back to specific cases where tracks that have not been my best through the years—and I go back to Phoenix and a track that Brad has had a lot of success at. I went down there and tested and was able to lean on Brad for a lot of advice and what he’s looking for and what he’s been successful with at Phoenix in the past.

“I was able to apply that and come home with a 10th-place run there at the beginning of the year.  That was just one of the first cases where it was like, ‘Man, this is gonna be really helpful for me.’”

The Roush Fenway Keselowski drivers kicked off the season by winning their respective Duel qualifying races for the Daytona 500. Fellow Ford driver Austin Cindric won the Great American Race. Chase Briscoe wheeled his Mustang to Victory Lane three races later at Phoenix. But since mid-March, Chevrolet has won five of the last seven races—seven total in the first 11 events. 

“You can’t chalk it up to just circumstances,” Buescher said. “There’s speed there. It’s definitely something we’re all chasing. I don’t have the answers for you on what it is. If I could tell you, we’d probably be working on it right now more aggressively. But we’re working really hard from the Ford camp to put fast race cars on the track. You go back all the way to Daytona and we had some awesome speed working together there. We had that potential at Talladega and we got most of our fleet of Fords wiped out by the end of the first stage, so we didn’t really have the opportunity to show that.  

“There’s been a lot of speed there. We’re all working on it and trying to find it. We’ve had some really good Ford Mustangs on track and we’ve had speed. We’ve got to put it all together.  I know Doug (Yates) and the entire Roush Yates Engine shop are working really hard to provide us with excellent horsepower that’s been completely reliable, which has been a big part and a big unknown with this car as well as we’ve seen some really big temperature spikes at a lot of these racetracks where we wouldn’t typically. A lot of work is going into it. We’re getting after it.  We’re not quitting or we’re not sitting stagnant right now.”

Buescher’s next challenge will come this weekend at Darlington Raceway. The livery of the No. 17 Ford will feature a throwback tribute to Matt Kenseth--who was voted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame on Wednesday. Kenseth won the 2003 Cup title with Roush Fenway along with 24 of his 39 career wins.

In nine starts at the Track too Tough to Tame, Buescher has scored two top-10 finishes, a pair of ninths in his last two starts. Just when it appeared he was figuring out the track, NASCAR changed the car. 

“It’s difficult every week,” Buescher said of the new car. “Darlington has never been accused of being an easy track, so there is that.  I think at the beginning of the year we may have been thinking of Darlington with a little bit more nerves knowing that simple wall impacts were really tweaking toe links and wrecking race cars, and I think we’ve moved past some of those issues.  

“We’ve seen the composite bodies and the durability of the Xfinity cars making heroes out of some drivers with a lot of aggression that would have paid a pretty big consequence in years past. I feel like we’re to a point now with the durability of our cars and with the bodies where they are, I think that there’s probably less penalty for being aggressive at Darlington. The stripe is something we always talk about when we go there, but it recently has cut tires down consistently. The body tolerances had gotten so tight that you hit the fence, knock the fender in on the tire and you cut it down and you’re done, or you’re playing catch-up the rest of the day.”

Cup drivers who came up through the Xfinity Series after the introduction of composite in 2017 have a good understanding of the car's limits. But the new Cup car features other nuances that drivers are still getting accustomed to.

“The difficult part is judging where we’re going to be there, judging what dirty air is going to be like,” Buescher said. “I think that this car has been significantly better running side-by-side. We have not had the big aero loose moments.  Dover showed a lot of that on restarts where the bottom does not get that loss of side force and that major penalty coming through (Turns) 1 and 2--even 3 and 4 on restarts. I think that’s going to come into play at Darlington as well, but the car is still very sensitive front-to-rear, and so that aero push when you’re getting in line, that’s going to be tough to overcome."