The Athletic’s Jordan Bianchi reported<\/a> Tuesday night that NASCAR denied the influencer his request to race in the O’Reilly’s Series race at Talladega on April 25. That’s the second-tier of NASCAR, below just the Cup Series.<\/p>\nCleetus McFarland isn’t his real name, for the record — it’s Garrett Mitchell.<\/p>\n
He has 4.7 million YouTube subscribers and millions of followers across his other social media accounts.<\/p>\n
But they won’t get to root him on at Talladega.<\/p>\n
Why did NASCAR deny Cleetus McFarland for Talladega?<\/p>\n
This is about safety from NASCAR’s point of view.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re all huge Cleetus fans. We all watch his videos and are certainly very appreciative of everything he\u2019s done in our sport and will continue to do in our sport,\u201d said John Probst,\u00a0NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer, in a statement. \u201cHe is approved right now for O\u2019Reilly Series short tracks, which means he\u2019s good for all of ARCA, all of (NASCAR\u2019s third-tier Truck Series), and then O\u2019Reilly up through the short tracks. We\u2019d like to see more out of Cleetus in the short tracks. So we\u2019re not saying no, but there is more that we would like to see out of Cleetus before we would approve him for Talladega.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cleetus raced at Rockingham Speedway recently on the O’Reilly Series and spun out twice, half-spun twice more and placed 32nd out of 38 drivers.<\/p>\n
Talladega’s racing is even tougher, with drivers packed especially close together at high speed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For now, Cleetus won’t get the chance there.<\/p>\n
MORE:\u00a0Yankees outfielder once battled ostrich in 11-plate spaghetti-eating contest<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cleetus McFarland wanted to race at Talladega, and he likely had millions of YouTube fans rooting for him…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-589428","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\/589428","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=589428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}