Garrett Mitchell aka Cleetus McFarland, a motorsports YouTube personality with nearly 5 million subscribers, made waves in NASCAR this weekend. His O\u2019Reilly Series debut at Rockingham was eventful, dividing fans and potentially leading to more questions than answers. At least, that may well be the case for Richard Childress Racing and NASCAR itself. <\/p>\n
To his credit, Cleetus McFarland finished the North Carolina Education Lottery 250 at Rockingham driving. To the vindication of many of his detractors, however, he crossed the line P32 a full 6 laps down. That was after he, by his own admission<\/a>, \u201cspun out 50 times, almost died 10 times.\u201d <\/p>\n On the bright side, he didn\u2019t ruin anyone\u2019s day and kept his No. 33 RCR machine intact. Those two achievements are significant to be sure, and likely contributed to McFarland\u2019s confidence in declaring that he\u2019d see his fans at Talladega in two weeks. But that decision is not necessarily his to make.<\/p>\n When news of Cleetus McFarland\u2019s RCR deal first broke, many in the NASCAR world questioned the governing body\u2019s approval process. Critics pointed to his Truck Series debut at Daytona<\/a>, which lasted just 6 laps before he lost it exiting Turn 4 and crashed. But Cleetus\u2019 O\u2019Reilly debut at Rockingham yesterday represents a step in that ongoing approval process. <\/p>\n NASCAR wanted to evaluate Cleetus at The Rock before they let him loose at a superspeedway like Talladega. And according to Richard Childress Racing\u2019s Vice President of O\u2019Reilly Series Operations, Danny Lawrence, they may not have seen enough.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, they\u2019ll look at everything. They might ask us to run another race because the thing about it is we didn\u2019t get to do a live pit stop,\u201d Lawrence said, per Motorsport<\/a>. \u201cThere were a lot of things they wanted to see happen that didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen he got sideways early, we automatically went into this conservation mode of just keep rolling and don\u2019t push it too hard. So, it\u2019s going to be close, but I would not be surprised if NASCAR didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Could we see RCR add another O\u2019Reilly race to Cleetus McFarland\u2019s schedule before he races Talladega and Daytona? It sounds like a real possibility. Whatever NASCAR and RCR decide, getting Cleetus up to speed is a journey 4.67 million YouTube subscribers<\/a> will follow. And wherever you land on his racing, that type of exposure has some major upside for the sport. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Garrett Mitchell aka Cleetus McFarland, a motorsports YouTube personality with nearly 5 million subscribers, made waves in NASCAR…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-584441","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\/584441","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=584441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}