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Given that he is both a NASCAR Cup Series driver and car owner, there is more than one way to measure the success of Brad Keselowski at any given time.

After becoming a Cup Series champion and earning more than 35 career wins, Keselowski is now in his fourth season as co-owner of RFK Racing, which he has taken from a former powerhouse that had fallen on hard times back to a habitual winner and one of NASCAR's top Ford teams. While continuing to drive RFK's flagship No. 6 in 2025, Keselowski has spearheaded the next step in the team's growth, expanding to three full-time cars with the addition of the No. 60 Ford driven by Ryan Preece.

Speaking to CBS Sports about the state of RFK Racing, Keselowski pointed to the expansion as being good for the organization in the present while also being critical for its future. How RFK Racing expanded, though, was a very thorough and deliberate process -- one that was two years in the making and included select starts for the No. 60 team a year ago, where they earned a best finish of fourth with road course racer Joey Hand at Chicago.

"I think about two years ago we looked at this and said this was critical to our future and to our success. And we began the path of saying 'well, how do we get there? We can't just turn on a third team overnight,'" Keselowski told CBS Sports. "We had a lot of discussions with some of our partners, we handpicked certain races for the 2024 season, and we moved around key personnel that would position us to be able to execute from four or five races in 2024.

"And then we were able to take that infrastructure that was slowly built during 2024 that gave us the bones of a team and pitched that to partners and bring in a blue chip brand like Kroger that helped us expand to a full-time three car team. So I look at that and I feel like we got there very intentionally, and we were able to obviously add a full-time driver in Ryan Preece and some more talent to the company and team over the last four to six months. It's been quite a journey, but a very intentional one."

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The No. 60 team took off in the literal sense to start the season, as it introduced itself spectacularly by sailing into the air upside down in the final laps of the Daytona 500. But it hasn't come back down to Earth -- in fact, the past several weeks have seen the No. 60 Ford ascend up the grid, with a third-place finish at Las Vegas serving as a springboard to a ninth at Homestead and a seventh at Martinsville.

Much of the team's early performance is a testament to RFK's choice of driver in Preece. Though a Cup veteran of nearly 200 starts entering 2025, Preece had seldom been in the right situation to run up front consistently, including at his previous team. Though the opportunity to drive for Stewart-Haas Racing was set to be Preece's big break in NASCAR, his tenure driving the team's No. 41 car -- once a Daytona 500 winner and habitual playoff team with Kurt Busch -- was marked by a lack of success as SHR's organization as a whole fell apart around him.

But where some saw Preece as underperforming in a car that was once a frontrunner, Keselowski -- thanks in part to being a Cup driver himself -- saw first-hand the way Preece conducted himself both behind the wheel and outside of the car. And so far, the things he had sensed in Preece as manifesting themselves through results on the racetrack.

"I hesitate to say I'm surprised. I thought a lot of Ryan before he came here, and I'm not surprised by his success," Keselowski said. "I'm happy for it and excited that he's doing all the things we thought he could do. I think he can do even more than he's done so far. I think he can win races. And we're pushing him to get to that spot -- and that's more than just him, by the way. It's the whole team, and they're responding very well.

"Right now what I like about Ryan is he's taking what we have and he's executing at a level that's probably as good or better than the equipment he's got. ... I like his work ethic, the moves he makes, how he takes smart risks – All of those to me are critical to being successful at this level. I think I saw those things and felt like if he was surrounded by the right pieces, whether that be people or equipment, that he could certainly capitalize."

Keselowski's own results are a bit of a different matter, as he has yet to earn a top 10 finish so far this year as the No. 6 team works through some turnover in personnel from a year ago. The hope is that things eventually click, ideally as soon as this weekend at Darlington Raceway -- where last year, Keselowski earned his first win at RFK Racing and ended a three-year winless streak with a victory in the track's Goodyear 400.

While Keselowski was a participant in Darlington's Throwback Weekend a year ago -- sporting a throwback to the legendary Castrol TOM's Supra that excelled in Japan's Super GT on its way to international fame -- he has taken a decidedly different approach this year, sporting a present day black and gold paint scheme promoting the launch of Castrol's product claims of 7 Critical Areas of performance and protection.

While the paint scheme deviates from the weekend theme in that it promotes a new campaign, there is some throwback flair to it -- namely through a nod to the cars Brad's father Bob Keselowski drove in ARCA in the early 1990s. And in an ideal scenario, the end result of the weekend could give the new Castrol Ford a legacy all its own.

"There are some throwback elements to it, probably the one that sticks out the most to me is the gold foil 6 on the car, which stands out as being something from my dad. He always ran gold foil numbers when I was a kid," Keselowski said. "But the scheme itself has its own identity with oil on it, and the black and gold that I actually really appreciate, and I certainly respect the message that Castrol's trying to get across. I think it's important.

"I think it's got its own design, its own flavor, and I'm excited to see it on the racetrack. It's something that's new and special to us, maybe not in the throwback sense, but today. Somebody made this comment when we did the unveil, 'hopefully this will be something that somebody else throws back to in another 10, 20 years' because we win in it this weekend. That's OK too."