Tristan McKee may not be old enough to drive on public roads without an adult yet, but that didn’t stop him from putting the racing world on notice on Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
McKee, who celebrated his 15th birthday on Aug. 3, won Friday’s ARCA Menards Series race at Watkins Glen by holding off the pack on a late restart and driving away into history in his ARCA debut.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The drivers chasing McKee in the closing laps included 18-year-old Tyler Reif, who won at Phoenix in 2023; 31-year-old Kris Wright, who, until Our Motorsports shut down in July, was a full-time driver in the NASCAR Xfinity Series; and 40-year-old Glen Reen, who was an established name on the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour before McKee was even born.\u00a0<\/p>\n
None of that seemed to faze McKee, who became the second-youngest winner in the history of the ARCA Menards Series at 15 years and five days of age.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But that’s just par for the course for a young driver who is wise beyond his years in every conceivable measure of the phrase.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You wouldn’t know that McKee, who piloted the No. 77 Chevrolet for Spire Motorsports on Friday, is only 15 by the way he drove around the New York road course. With a host of more experienced and more polished drivers behind him, McKee showed why his name has begun to pop up in conversations regarding NASCAR’s brightest prospects.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You also wouldn’t know that McKee is only 15 by the way he conducted himself after the race. It would be a completely warranted reaction for McKee to have celebrated in a Ricky Bobby-esque manner: yelling, screaming and partying like there was no tomorrow.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Instead, the Williamsburg, Virginia, native did a burnout, saluted the crowd and collected the checkered flag like his effort at Watkins Glen was a Sunday drive down a gravel road.<\/p>\n
Time will tell what will eventually become of McKee’s racing career, but if Friday’s race is any indication, he’ll be a household name in no time.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tristan McKee may not be old enough to drive on public roads without an adult yet, but that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-56235","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nascar","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56235","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=56235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}