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Who Won Saturday’s ARCA Race at Talladega? Cleetus McFarland, Though He Only Finished 10th
Like many young, career-minded people, Garrett Mitchell came to a significant fork in the road. Do I continue with law school, or do I take a chance that I’ll be able to make some sort of impact as a character on YouTube?
YouTube won, and Garrett Mitchell morphed into his near-full-time guise as Cleetus McFarland, a dedicated, uber-patriotic redneck, whom ye shall know by his mullet haircut and shirts with the sleeves torn off.
If you happened to watch the ARCA stock car race at Talladega Superspeedway on Fox Sports 1 last Saturday, you couldn’t miss McFarland, driver of the rented number 30 Rette-Jones Racing Ford, sitting in a seat most recently occupied by Malcolm in the Middle star Frankie Muniz, who is trying to make it in NASCAR now.
Actually, no way is it the same seat: Muniz is five feet, five inches tall, and McFarland is six feet, six inches.
Anyway, in only his second start in ARCA, bold adventurer McFarland scored a 10th-place finish, and ARCA awarded him with the “Reese’s Sweet Move of the Race” for, ARCA says, “avoiding disaster” by dodging a couple of spinning cars in front of him. This was documented by McFarland’s in-car camera, where he was shown pumping his fist after the, uh, sweet move. Likely what ARCA and Reese’s were actually rewarding McFarland for was maybe a couple million dollars’ worth of publicity.
In case you didn’t know, ARCA stands for Automobile Racing Club of America, founded in 1953. NASCAR bought it in 2018, but ARCA has continued doing what it always has: Offer a shorter season that looks and sounds like NASCAR—the cars are, in fact, mostly based on Generation-5 NASCAR racers (current Cup cars are Gen-7)—but ARCA costs much less to compete in, yet races at many of the same tracks as NASCAR. Like Daytona International Speedway, the site of McFarland’s first start last February, and Talladega Superspeedway, where NASCAR raced on Sunday.
ARCA cars wear Chevrolet, Ford, and Toyota bodies, but almost all the cars are powered by a 396-cubic-inch V-8 built by Ilmor, known mostly for building IndyCar engines. That same engine is used in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. Ilmor claims it’s capable of 700 horsepower, but is detuned for ARCA and truck racing. Patterned somewhat after a Chevrolet LS V-8, the 396 was introduced to ARCA in 2015, at a cost of $35,000 per engine for the teams.
McFarland said after the race on the Fox Sports interview—possibly the first time the broadcast team has ever featured a 10th-place ARCA finisher—that the reason he didn’t do better was because his Ilmor engine broke a valve spring in the first few laps of the race, rendering his Ford “a dog,” much slower than the healthy cars of his competition. He said his crew was telling him on the radio to speed up, and he told them, “’Brother, this sucker’s wide open!’ You know what I’m sayin’? It was like I was ridin’ a horse out there!”
That interview hints at the power of a man with 4.28 million YouTube followers: He live-broadcast the race from inside the car and drew nearly 70,000 YouTube viewers. His participation has been a godsend for little ARCA, which is typically ignored by the media. Now, the series is featured in a McFarland story that just ran on Newsweek.com, for gosh sakes.
Indeed, the legal profession’s loss seems to be McFarland’s gain: Few 30-year-old lawyers are making what McFarland is, judging from some of his major purchases. Among his biggest is DeSoto Speedway, a third-mile paved oval near Bradenton, Florida, just south of Tampa, remembered mostly as the place where accomplished sprint car, IndyCar and ARCA driver Dave Steele was killed in 2017, and perhaps where stuntman Robbie Knievel jumped his motorcycle over 30 Subarus in 1990, which was a world record for… jumping over Subarus. Or where the legendary short-track ace Butch Lindley crashed hard in 1985, an accident from which he never awoke. He died five years later.
Not long after Steele was killed in that sprint car race, DeSoto Speedway closed and was put up for sale. In 2020, it became the first major purchase for McFarland, who bought it for $2.2 million, well below the previous asking price. He repurposed the track as the Freedom Factory, where he stages many of the events featured on his YouTube channel. He also bought a major share of Bradenton Motorsports Park, a first-class, quarter-mile drag strip next door to the oval that also appears in his videos.
And a year ago, he bought a grass-strip airport located close to the Freedom Factory, apparently paying $3.5 million for it. He renamed it Bald Eagle Airfield, because McFarland frequently cites bald eagles as an inspiration.
Why did he want an airport? Because he flies planes and helicopters. Last weekend, you may have noticed NASCAR Hall of Fame-nominated driver Greg Biffle in McFarland’s pit: Biffle also flies his own helicopter, and the two paired up last year to transport food and other aid to isolated North Carolina residents stricken by Hurricane Helene, and became fast friends.
Another McFarland pal: Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who drove the former NASCAR Craftsman truck that McFarland rebuilt as a 1600-horsepower, four-wheel-drive drag racer painted up like Dale Sr.’s number 3 Cup car. Earnhardt drove the truck down the back straight of the Talladega track twice for a McFarland video. Earnhardt hit 140 mph in 660 feet. Earnhardt got out of the truck and said, “Really, really fast. Like really fast. I know I know there’s things that are a lot faster, but that was a blast, man. That was a thrill.”
Yes, being Cleetus McFarland, a character he created 10 years ago, has been good to Garrett Mitchell, Not-Attorney-at-Law. As for more ARCA racing: He said he’ll see, leaving as a possibility a fall trip to ARCA’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway on September 11. Those ARCA cars aren’t cheap to rent, but he can probably afford it.
