Richard Childress Racing casts doubt on Cleetus McFarland’s NASCAR preparedness for Talladega

Garrett Mitchell aka Cleetus McFarland, a motorsports YouTube personality with nearly 5 million subscribers, made waves in NASCAR this weekend. His O’Reilly 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.

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, “spun out 50 times, almost died 10 times.”

On the bright side, he didn’t ruin anyone’s day and kept his No. 33 RCR machine intact. Those two achievements are significant, to be sure, and likely contributed to McFarland’s confidence in declaring that he’d see his fans at Talladega in two weeks. But that decision is not necessarily his to make.

When news of Cleetus McFarland’s RCR deal first broke, many in the NASCAR world questioned the governing body’s approval process. Critics pointed to his Truck Series debut at Daytona, which lasted just 6 laps before he lost it exiting Turn 4 and crashed. But Cleetus’ O’Reilly debut at Rockingham yesterday represents a step in that ongoing approval process.

NASCAR wanted to evaluate Cleetus at The Rock before they let him loose at a superspeedway like Talladega. And according to Richard Childress Racing’s Vice President of O’Reilly Series Operations, Danny Lawrence, they may not have seen enough.

“Well, they’ll look at everything. They might ask us to run another race because the thing about it is we didn’t get to do a live pit stop,” Lawrence said, per Motorsport. “There were a lot of things they wanted to see happen that didn’t happen.

“When he got sideways early, we automatically went into this conservation mode of just keep rolling and don’t push it too hard. So, it’s going to be close, but I would not be surprised if NASCAR didn’t 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.”

Could we see RCR add another O’Reilly race to Cleetus McFarland’s schedule before Talladega on April 25th? It sounds like a real possibility. Whatever NASCAR and RCR decide, getting Cleetus up to speed is a journey 4.67 million YouTube subscribers will follow. And wherever you land on his racing, that type of exposure has some major upside for the sport.