NASCAR denied Cleetus McFarland's Talladega clearance on April 7. He said they were right. That's the part everyone is glossing over.
By PitByNumbers Staff 5 min read C leetus McFarland has 4.6 million YouTube subscribers, a racetrack he owns in Florida, and until recently, a plan to race at Talladega. His real name is Garrett Mitchell. He turned 31 on April 5th.
To celebrate, he spun out four times at Rockingham Speedway, drew a caution that nearly collected half the field, finished 32nd, and went home six laps down. Two days later, NASCAR told him he wasn't ready for Talladega. He said they were right.
That's the part of this story everyone is glossing over. KEY TAKEAWAYS — NASCAR Made the Right Call Here's what people forget about Talladega. It isn't just a fast racetrack.
It's 40 cars traveling at 200 miles per hour in a pack with inches of separation, where one bad input doesn't cost you a position — it costs everyone around you a race car. Sometimes more than that. At Rockingham, McFarland produced 4 spins in 250 laps — including a lap 206 moment that sent his RCR Chevrolet sliding across the track toward a sizable chunk of the field.
Nobody got hurt. Nobody got collected. That's genuinely good news.
It's also exactly the kind of data NASCAR looks at when deciding whether to hand someone a superspeedway license. They looked at it. They said no.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. — who has been part of McFarland's development and isn't exactly known for pulling punches — backed the call publicly on the Dale Jr. Download.
He watched the Truck test at Niece Motorsports. He watched the O'Reilly test with RCR. He watched Rockingham.
"I saw enough to not approve him for Daytona or Talladega in the O'Reilly Series," Earnhardt said. That's not a dismissal. That's a mentor refusing to pretend the work is finished — which is the most useful thing anyone could say right now.
For the people framing this as gatekeeping: NASCAR confirmed McFarland is cleared for all of ARCA, all of Trucks, and O'Reilly short tracks. The denial was superspeedway-specific. The door isn't closed.
It just has a lock on it, and the combination is seat time. Now Here's the Part Nobody Saw Coming McFarland built his following on personality, horsepower, and a complete absence of taking himself too seriously. He walks into NASCAR, lands a ride with Richard Childress Racing, and immediately becomes one of the most covered stories in the sport.
The internet writes the next chapter for him automatically: spin out, get denied, post an aggrieved video, let the fans do the outrage work for you. He didn't do any of that. McFarland's post-denial video owned the mistakes immediately — the three-wide pass attempt on lap 3, all four spins, the caution, the finish — and landed on one sentence: "I've got a lot to learn, guys." No deflection.
No blaming the track. No pointing at the hectic race conditions as an excuse, even though Rockingham's hard tire on a freshly paved surface is legitimately one of the trickier combinations on the calendar. He just said what was true and moved on.
His full response: "Little bit of a kick in the nuts, but I've just got to get out there in other cars, do as much learning as possible, and then hopefully I'll get to run Daytona and Talladega next year." For context — earlier that same morning at Rockingham, McFarland finished 4th in the ARCA Menards East race in a different car at the same track. He went top-5 in the first race and four spins in the second, back to back, on the same day. That's not a talent problem.
That's a learning curve being compressed at a pace that would break most people, and he knows exactly what it means. He's been in NASCAR-sanctioned competition for about 14 months. In that time he posted a 10th at Talladega and a 9th at Charlotte in ARCA — the Charlotte finish came the year prior after running most of the Talladega race on 7 cylinders with a broken valve spring.
The RCR deal is a multi-race commitment across two seasons, not a publicity stunt with an expiration date. Talladega is still on the calendar. It's just 2027 now instead of April 25th.
What This Actually Tells You NASCAR's approval process isn't theater. It applies to everyone — including the most marketable name on the entry list — and it held on April 7th. That's good for the sport, good for the field, and honestly good for McFarland.
Cleetus McFarland showed up to his own birthday party at Rockingham, spun out four times, got denied at Talladega, and called it a kick in the nuts instead of an injustice. One of those two things was more impressive than it looked.