Brad Keselowski will miss the preseason Clash but vows he will be ready for the Daytona 500 after breaking his right femur from a fall getting out of his vehicle Dec. 18 while on a ski trip.
RFK Racing reserve driver Corey LaJoie will replace Keselowski at the Clash on Feb. 1 at Bowman Gray Stadium, and LaJoie will be Keselowski’s standby driver for the start of the season.
“I didn’t want to rush back,” Keselowski told me Thursday afternoon. “The team and I made the decision together that if all the rehab went absolutely perfect, we’d be ready like, literally, the day of the Clash.
“And that seemed super foolish and didn’t give us any time to do any testing on myself or anything like that.”
Keselowski said he spends six to eight hours a day in rehab, which covers everything from brutal workouts to sitting on ice and having machines hooked up to him — or as he put it, devices that are “either shocking you, squeezing you or freezing you.”
The normal recovery time for this injury is 8 to 12 weeks, and Keselowski said his rehab is being directed by a team from Atrium Health.
“I’m really proud of the team of people I have doing the rehab and the race team is working really hard. I’m happy for Corey to get this opportunity,” Keselowski said. “I can’t wait to see what he does with it.
“I’m ready to get back to Daytona. … This is a minor setback.”
Keselowski hopes to have a medical evaluation test Feb. 5 at Charlotte Motor Speedway (NASCAR rules allow for a closed test with limited tires for a driver and his doctors to show that he is ready to race).
Keselowski said his return is conditional on three elements:
–Not needing any prescribed pain medication.
–Being able to walk at a reasonable level and be able to get in and out of the car.
–Having some sign of bone regeneration.
“I’m not great, but I’m good,” Keselowski said. “I’m recovering really well. I had a major injury. I’m on a significant rehab plan to be back for the Daytona 500. … I’m now made of titanium in my leg.
“It’s a really painful thing to break. It’s the biggest bone in your body, which is kind of the bad part about it. The good thing is it’s also one of the fastest healing parts of your body, so I’m just really dealing with the pain and trying to recover as fast as I can.”
Keselowski said the injury occurred after he had dropped his daughter off for ski lessons. He returned to where they were staying at the report and slipped and fell on ice. He sheared his femur (not breaking the skin) and needed emergency surgery at a hospital in Boone, N.C.
“I’ve been doing this racing thing for a while, and I broke fingers, wrists, ribs, ankle,” Keselowski said. “Before I was in racing, I broke my nose. I’ve broken a lot of different bones and parts of my body.
“I will tell you, none of them come close to hurting as bad as breaking your femur. It’s a very painful injury, but the recovery is actually fairly similar in time and so forth. So I’ve just got to be tough and get through it.”
Keselowski said he did suffer some nerve damage.
“When I first had the injury, I had no feeling in my right leg from my knee up to my hip,” Keselowski said. “My foot and ankle and all that was good. My calf was good, but I couldn’t feel any of my quad or any of that stuff.
“So all those nerves are slowly reconnecting. They’ve got now to where I can almost walk, which is good, and I can almost lift my leg on my own. So the nerves are starting to reconnect. All the muscles there, everything there’s fine, I just got to reconnect all those things.”
The accident occurred on the first day of his trip.
“It’s kind of a freak accident,” Keselowski said. “I just fell perfectly on a spot that broke my leg. I wish it was some cooler story than that, like jumping or doing something on the slopes.
“I think everybody thinks I did it on the slopes, which sounds a lot cooler than the actual story I have, but it just was a freak accident.”
As Keselowski was in the ambulance, he started receiving texts about the Greg Biffle plane crash, which had occurred the same morning. He said that tragedy certainly put his injury in perspective.
“I was thinking I was having one the worst days of my life — I was in agonizing pain and all kinds of problems going on,” Keselowski said. “And then you see something like that, you just think to yourself, ‘My problems can be way worse.”
The 41-year-old Keselowski was adamant the injury won’t keep him from racing as long as he wants to continue as a Cup driver.
“I really want to run into my late 40s,” Keselowski said. “There’s some actually kind of rewarding parts of it — I’m at my house all day, every day, so I get to see my kids a lot right now, and I’m enjoying that part of it.
“I’m enjoying the challenge of having a great team of people around me and putting the work in. If anything, it’s a reminder of what my life would be like if I wasn’t racing. And it makes me want to race.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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