NASCAR’s Biggest Mistake? Holding Back Cleetus McFarland

Cleetus McFarland is boosting NASCAR ratings and bringing new fans, but insiders are pushing back and cost NASCAR a genuine opportunity to grow. This is about racing and the future of the sport.

I don’t normally write about race cars or racecar drivers. In fact, with the exception of F1, I hardly ever watched racing of any kind, and now, since F1 has screwed where to watch and I still can’t get it without paying more to the cable company, I don’t watch them at all. And I certainly wasn’t spending a lot of time watching NASCAR or Dragsters. That was, until Cleetus McFarland showed up. Now, if he’s there racing, I watch NASCAR and Dragsters and Burn out competitions and STOL competitions and Jet boats.

I watch Cleetus.

This is a lot like Luka Doncic’. Luka was with the Mavericks for six and a half years and got traded in the stupidest trade of all time to the Los Angeles Lakers. Now I watch the Lakers. I wasn’t watching the Mavs because I lived in Dallas (well, not mostly). I was watching the Mavs because that’s where Luka played. Now he plays in LA so I watch the Lakers.

Same with Cleetus. If he’s in the race, I watch. If he’s not in the race, not so much. This will be an issue later in the article.

Cleetus has recently become the guy whose name you should put in the title of your videos and articles because, SEO wise… your shit will blow up online. He’s a full blown phenomenon. He is a YouTube sensation and a race car driver and suddenly, overnight (read, years of work) he’s who everybody not watching Trump destroy the world on YouTube is talking about, especially with regard to NASCAR, whether they want to or not.

And by that I mean, he is and has been the subject du jour in NASCAR for a while now and that’s because the guy is driving in the ARCA (East) series and the O’Reilly’s Series and his eventual goal is to drive in the Cup Series. And all the talk is about, should he be there?

I started watching Cleetus McFarland on YouTube a few years ago. I like the show. I like his team of folks. I like him. He comes across as genuine and normal and human. He and his team don’t try to artificially create circumstances and scenarios just to fill up minutes of content. They produce events and capture them for video and they also record a lot of the basic everyday stuff that hot rodders go through making and building cars that go super fast.

Cleetus, real name Garrett Mitchell, and his guys have, for several years now, raced eighth mile and quarter mile dragsters in multiple categories. Mitchell owns a drag strip in central western Florida and a 3/8th mile oval track located in Bradenton, FL. The track and it’s facilities are called the Freedom Factory. The track had been abandoned in 2017 and was subsequently purchased and restored (a work in progress). The Freedom Factory is now holding many events year round and the entire environment is 100% family friendly.

Cleetus (yes, we all know that that should be spelled Cletus but this is how it is written in this context) has built and invested and grown a brand in the drag racing world. He is well liked and respected and nobody has a bad thing to say about him… in the drag race world.

But somehow and for whatever reasons, NASCAR folks have lost their shit and divided themselves into two very clear and distinct factions. He’s welcome and he’s not welcome.

Before we get too far into the how’s and why’s he’s even in the NASCAR stuff, let me tell you what I know about this guy for 100% certain. He is a racer. He is a wheel man. He is a naturally super competitive guy and if you put him into any vehicle, he will race it… he will find a race… and he will probably win. I’ve watched him race dragsters, jet boats, airplanes, sand rails, stadium trucks, custom snow choppers and more. He wants to go fast and he always has.

Also, if you look at the race world, a lot of those guys a cranky and mean and talk shit about each other all the time. Fights happen. Grudges are built and expressed and there is genuine bad blood between lots of drivers and teams. But, Cleetus is a constant good. He is well liked and sought after. He’s a good guy and his people are good people and they keep it that way. And if it starts to go sideways, LS George (Squirrel McNutt) Cleetus’ on-screen side kick and actual best friend gets it turned back. They are good, happy people: grateful and calm… inviting. What’s not to like?

So, he’s racing stuff and making his YouTube show… one of the most popular channels on the internet. They hold an event at the Freedom Factory (The Freedom 500 or le Mullets, I can’t remember which) and he meets Greg Biffle, a well known and respected senior NASCAR driver. He wasn’t as old as me but from the current crop of drivers, he was a bit long in the tooth. Anyway, they become friends. Good friends, close. Mentor and mentee friends and Cleetus says he would someday like to race at Daytona and Talladega, two of the biggest and most famous tracks in motorsport. And Biffle, aka the Biff, says it’s doable but you have to do a few things first. You have to race some slower cars, get some results, prove to people with money that they can trust you with the car and trust you not to get people killed. And they set out to accomplish it all.

The first step was to drive in ARCA. ARCA is like double AA ball. It’s where you go to prove you can handle real competition, real speed, real pressure… but it’s not the show yet. From there you move up to the Craftsman Truck Series and the O’Reilly Series, that’s your AAA, still fast, still serious, but not quite the big leagues. And then there’s the Cup Series… that’s the bigs… that’s where the names live, where the money is, where everything matters. For the uninitiated, there are twenty some series and divisions within NASCAR, most of them regional or international, but those are the ones that matter here… ARCA, Trucks and O’Reilly, then Cup. That’s the ladder. That’s the climb.

So Greg knows a guy and he gets Cleetus a test in an ARCA car and before you know it, he’s got a team and a sponsor (race cars are expensive). Rette Jones Racing owns the racing team and the car and Cleetus reached out to a company that already advertises on the show, energy drink maker Kinetik is the sponsor of the car.

In his first ever ARCA race at Talladega, he nursed a car with one broken piston rod to a 10th place finish, 11th at Daytona to start the 2026 season and just last week, a 4th place finish at Rockingham, one of the hardest tracks to race. And by the way, ratings were over the moon. NASCAR ratings have fallen pretty low over the last decade and Cleetus appears to be a tonic they really need. When he’s there, like me, the people watch.

This year, Squirrel McNutt is also racing ARCA and in his first race ever he took 13th at Hickory Motor Speedway and he followed that up with a 9th place finish at Rockingham.

So all good for Cleet and Squirrel, right? Well, not 100%. In the middle of all of this, RCR (Richard Childress Racing) offered Cleetus a test and a seat for the O’Reilly’s Series and then on the same day that he took a 4th at Rockingham in the ARCA car, he also took 32nd out of 38 in the O’Reilly’s race after having a few spinouts THAT DID NOT DAMAGE THE CAR OR ANYBODY ELSE. He finished on tires that were more like roller skates because his spins had trashed the allotted number of tires any team can run in a race.

Everybody was watching and looking for a thing. Those like me wanted to see a sign that he’d be ok and that he can survive there and the others were looking for a reason to say, “See, he caint drive no better than a june bug. We should kick him the hell out of our special club of driving saints and Murican heroes becuz we is like brain surgeon smart how we drive cars.”

Ok, so he spun out several times. One was his fault. One was somebody else’s fault and one was strictly speaking, the tires’ fault. Everybody on that track has spun out and most of them have also destroyed a car and taken out a bunch of drivers that had nothing to do with the accident. It’s also important to note that he also got a Craftsman Truck race to try as well but it ended after a handful of laps when given the choice between wrecking the car or wrecking the field, he chose to wreck the car and not ruin anybody else’s day. And the very next day, in an ARCA car, he had a top ten finish on the same track.

But almost immediately, NASCAR icons started talking about how he doesn’t belong there. Some cushioned it by including the word ‘yet’. but, they forget that they were rookies once, too. There is a learning curve. It’s not impossible, they did it.

I’mma say it again… Cleetus is a natural driver, and for that matter, so is Squirrel. Both of them have been behind the wheels of fast cars for a long time. Natural Wheelmen. But these older, former drivers, with their careers behind them and their trophies collecting dust on the mantle, these retired legends who see themselves as the gatekeepers of NASCAR all started pointing fingers and waggling and saying I told you so, etc. And they put a lot of pressure on NASCAR and then in an abundance of caution, NASCAR has yanked Cleetus’ ticket to the big tracks until further notice. And the silliest of things is that the smaller tracks are harder to drive then the super tracks like Daytona and Talladega. They didn’t say he couldn’t drive, only that he had to keep driving short tracks and that they would revisit the decision somewhere down the road.

OK, so now he’s racing ARCA on any track and O’Reilly’s on short tracks. What’s the big deal?

This is my point to NASCAR… You are shooting yourselves in the dicks trying to accommodate a bunch of whiners and babies most of whom are no longer drivers. While at the same time, taking the brightest star for ratings that they’ve had in a generation. He’s warm and friendly and media savvy and he generates ratings and buzz and sells merch. He gives great interviews and people love him. Contrast that with the 2nd place driver at Hickory, during the after race interview, acted like a snotty 19 year old who felt like he deserved the win, had been cheated and had shitty attitude oozing out of him. In fact, while they were doing that interview, track side, Squirrel was getting out of his car and the crowd went nuts. Those who were paying attention to Reeves booed his poor attitude and poor sportsmanship. Squirrel on the other hand was ear to ear smiles and while thanking everybody who came out, he had to turn away as he was about to choke up a bit. That’s what this sport needs. Good people. Not snotty kids and grumpy old men.

These same snots and grumps have been grinding Carson Hocevar as well. He’s a great guy who won a race at the Freedom Factory and became friends with the whole Cleetus family. They get on him because he’s aggressive, forgetting of course, that they are too and have always been. He’s just new to them and they see the writing on the wall.

NASCAR has some choices to make. They can coddle a bunch of old influencers and massage their egos or they can grab the first bit of good news for this sport in a very long time. They can open the doors a bit and let in some folks that can fill seats and watch streaming races or they can shoot themselves in the dicks and kill the whole thing before it grows. I believe that NASCAR is inclined towards the future and I think guys like Cleetus and Squirrel and Hocevar are part of the future. Others to highlight, good people with good hearts and attitudes who also know that not only is it a race, it’s also a tv show and stop being a dick, like: Sam Hornish Jr, Ricky Stenhouse Jr and Matt Kenseth.

Take the ratings win, NASCAR. Let Cleetus drive the big tracks, too. You win more letting him race than you lose if he screws up. It isn’t rocket science. It’s driving fast. It’s believing that you can go 3 wide on the low side even if your tires don’t hold. It’s knowing, in that moment, you are the greatest driver that ever lived and nobody, not the old guys, not the snots, not the committees and the executives, can keep you from spreading your wings and bald eagling all over the place.

Originally published at http://tmotr.wordpress.com on April 11, 2026.