Cleetus McFarland made his NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series debut this past Saturday at Rockingham Speedway. It was an adventurous day for the YouTube sensation, who went for a spin multiple times and finished P32, six laps down.

McFarland now has one NOAPS and one Truck Series start under his belt in 2026. He’s also made a couple of starts in the ARCA Menards Series, finishing fourth in Saturday’s ARCA Menards Series East race at Rockingham.

ARCA is where his next start is scheduled to come. McFarland will be in the field for the April 18 event at Kansas Speedway. He will return the following weekend to compete at Talladega Superspeedway.

Talladega could very well be a busy weekend for McFarland, as his three-race NOAPS deal with Richard Childress Racing includes Talladega and Daytona International Speedway. Both of those scheduled starts are pending approval from NASCAR.

RCR not optimistic about Cleetus McFarland approval for Talladega

This past Saturday was important for McFarland, who needed to impress NASCAR enough to gain approval to compete in a NOAPS superspeedway event. According to RCR vice president of NOAPS operations Danny Lawrence, they may not have seen enough.

“Well, they’ll look at everything. They might ask us to run another race because the thing about it is we didn’t get to do a live pit stop,” Lawrence said, per Motorsport. “There were a lot of things they wanted to see happen that didn’t happen.

“When he got sideways early, we automatically went into this conservation mode of just keep rolling and don’t push it too hard. So, it’s going to be close, but I would not be surprised if NASCAR didn’t want us to run another race before we got to Daytona and Talladega. Everything happens so fast there that we all want to be prepared when we do take him there.”

McFarland will be the first to admit he’s has a ways to go to become competitive in the NOAPS. Rockingham kicked his butt, but he was happy to finish.

“O’Reilly, as predicted got my butt kicked,” McFarland said. “But I finished the race. Our goal as a team was to finish the race and not get last. So we did meet our goals. We did have higher expectations, or higher wants — I think we got to 26th for a minute and I was like so excited just to hear that that literally the next corner I went in and spun out because I was just going too danged fast for my own abilities.”