NASCAR Ford team, Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing (RFK), recently announced intent to compete with a third entry in the 2024 Daytona 500, fielding the No. 60 Mustang for David Ragan. The Great American Race will mark the first for RFK’s new Stage 60 program, which the organization hopes to expand into a third fulltime entry in the future, according to a recent report from NASCAR.com.
The No. 60 Ford Mustang will be a part-time Cup Series competitor in 2024, and Ragan will be just one of several drivers who will take control of the race car next year. RFK part-owner Brad Keselowski said that he hopes fielding a third entry in the Daytona 500 will help ease his organization into permanently racing with three race cars.
“The principle behind it was, ‘hey, we want to get to a third car,’ but just going out, and even if you were to go buy a charter tomorrow and even if you were to sign the right partners tomorrow, you still would need to have people and have assets,” Keselowski said “And so we realized that we needed to kind of crawl, walk, and run our way to making that a successful venture.”
RFK’s Stage 60 program is similar to an existing program run by a Chevy team in the Cup Series. Project 91 is fielded by Trackhouse Racing and has allowed international drivers like Shane van Gisbergen to get a taste of NASCAR racing. However, Keselowski indicated that Stage 60 will not be solely focused on NASCAR, and is exploring the idea of competing in IMSA in the future.
“I don’t think we’re thinking of [Stage 60] as an R&D effort,” Keselowski said. “We’re thinking of it as a really targeted effort to go out there and learn with new drivers and find new opportunities for new partners and new people within the organization.”
He added, “So I think we’re looking at it with kind of this fresher look of hopefully we’ll be able to sign a few more partners for some of the road-course events and the superspeedway events is really what we have targeted for this year. And if we’re able to do that, we’d like to bring some fresh faces into the sport.”
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