'I Just Want to Win': Brad Keselowski Rues Second Place Finish as Chase Elliott ‘Doubles Up’ With Alex Bowman to Win at Atlanta

It was a good news-bad news night for Brad Keselowski in Saturday’s Quaker State 400 at EchoPark Speedway in Georgia.

The good news is he earned his best finish of the season, finishing second to race winner Chase Elliott. In doing so, Keselowski moved up from 30^th to 27^th in the NASCAR Cup standings with eight races now remaining to make the playoffs.

The bad news is Keselowski is so far back points-wise that he knows — and pretty much everybody else knows — that he needs a win to make the playoffs.

“He (Elliott) just had the 48 (Alex Bowman) behind him giving him a huge push and (there was) nothing I could do to cover that,” Keselowski said after the race. “We had our cars linked up at RFK. We could do the same thing and we lost that, and then it was just kind of a two-on-one. I fought as hard as I could.”

Keselowski led 46 laps in the race, second-most of all 40 drivers entered. For quite a while, he had great support from his RFK Racing teammates, Chris Buescher and Ryan Preece.

Unfortunately, his teammates faded late in the race (Buescher finished 9^th, Preece 15^th), leaving Keselowski by himself to fight the big, bad Hendrick 1-2 punch of Elliott and Bowman.

“The cars get too big of runs and it ain’t over until it’s over,” Keselowski said. “Every time I got the lead, I couldn’t seem to get everything to go our way. If we could have got a yellow or anything there, it certainly would have been helpful, but that didn’t happen.”