{"id":518760,"date":"2026-03-06T19:23:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/518760\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T19:23:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:23:08","slug":"nascar-cup-series-star-reveals-instrumental-role-in-cleetus-mcfarland-rcr-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/518760\/","title":{"rendered":"NASCAR Cup Series star reveals instrumental role in Cleetus McFarland RCR deal"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASCAR Cup Series<\/a> star Ty Dillon has revealed the role he played in Cleetus McFarland<\/a> landing a two-year race deal at Richard Childress Racing.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, the legendary NASCAR outfit confirmed that McFarland, whose real name is Garrett Mitchell, was set to make his O’Reilly Series debut in their No. 33 Chevrolet at <\/a>Rockingham Speedway on April 4<\/a>. McFarland later revealed he had signed for two years and was set to run at all of the superspeedway races for the team.<\/p>\n

This all comes despite McFarland’s lack of experience in NASCAR, having only raced once in a national series race, which came in the Truck race at Daytona in February.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, that ended in a self-inflicted wreck on lap six, leading to plenty of discussion in the NASCAR community about whether or not he should have been approved to race<\/a> in the first place.<\/p>\n

That Truck race did attract a huge audience (1,604,000 peak viewership)<\/a>, though, and McFarland’s 4.6 million YouTube subscribers and the following that brings no doubt played a part.<\/p>\n

Ty Dillon’s role in Cleetus McFarland deal<\/p>\n

Following the announcement, some have questioned RCR and NASCAR’s decision here once, but Cup Series driver Dillon believes it is great.<\/p>\n

For those who aren’t aware, Dillon is the grandson of RCR owner Richard Childress, and clearly, he has some influence within the organization, revealing the role he played in McFarland landing the drive.<\/p>\n

“I think we can make this work. I think it’s going to be good for both sides,\u201d Dillon explained on The Gluckcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis fan base is our fan base, but we need to kind of merge them together, right? Like, I think his people will love us. I think our people will love him, and then the sport of NASCAR together, we can put something great together.”<\/p>\n

Cleetus phone call<\/p>\n

Dillon continued: \u201cSo I called him. I was like, \u2018Hey man, what do you think about this idea? I know you’re wanting to race in NASCAR\u2019 and asked him, like, \u2018What is your goal?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s like, I love the superspeedways, and I would love to one day race in the Cup Series. Daytona 500 would be awesome, and so I was like, \u2018Okay, I’m gonna talk a little bit more, see what we can figure out, but I think there’s some synergy here, and we would only want to do this if you can stay original to who you are, we wouldn’t want this to take you off of who Cleetus is, what your channel is, and what makes you fun\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd if we’re not having fun doing this whole project, we’re failing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASCAR Cup Series star Ty Dillon has revealed the role he played in Cleetus McFarland landing a two-year…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-518760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}