Winning in the Sprint Cup Series is hard.
Doing it three race weekends in a row? That should be even harder.
But it’s happened twice in the last year and the possibility is open for it to occur this weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Brad Keselowski and the Sprint Cup Series head to the “Magic Mile” in Loudon for the New Hampshire 301 and Keselowski will be gunning to win his third win in three weeks. It’s an accomplishment only achieved three times in the Chase for the Sprint Cup era, which began 2004.
Prior to 2015, the only driver to do it was Jimmie Johnson in 2007. That year Johnson won four straight races - at Martinsville, Atlanta, Texas and Phoenix - during the second of six championship campaigns.
But then last season Kyle Busch and Joey Logano, Keselowski’s teammate, pulled off the three-peat. It was the first time two drivers had earned a hat trick in the same season since Mark Martin and Rusty Wallace in 1993.
Busch did it at Kentucky, New Hampshire and Indianapolis. Logano became the first driver to sweep a full round of the Chase when he won at Charlotte, Kansas and Talladega.
Now Keselowski is teed up to go for three in a row thanks to a dominating performance in the Coke Zero 400 at Daytona and his impressive display of saving fuel at Kentucky, a track he now has three wins at.
“If you had asked me before these last two or weeks ‘which race do you think you have the best shot of winning at,’ I would have said Loudon, New Hampshire,” Keselowski said in a NASCAR on NBC Facebook Live interview Thursday. “Daytona was historically not a very good race track for us and Kentucky changed dramatically with the repave and quite honestly I’ve stunk up the show on repaves.”
Loudon represents a track Team Penske has found success at in recent years. The team swept the two races at New Hampshire, with Keselowski winning the July race and Logano going to victory lane in the fall. In 13 starts there, Keselowski has five top fives and eight top 10s. His average finish is 10.4.
“I look at Loudon, New Hampshire and the first thing I think of is I like that track,” said Keselowski, who has led 321 laps in the last four visits to Loudon. “My crew chief Paul Wolfe is from that area (Milford, New York), he takes a lot of pride in that race track ... I always feel he puts a little bit extra in the race car for when we go to Loudon.”
“I was feeling good about Loudon and now I’m feeling even better.”