Farah: Cleetus McFarland's Spec Crown Vic Race Was My Wildest Motorsport Experience Yet

There are race events you attend, and there are race events that happen to you. Stafford Motor Speedway on a Cleetus McFarland Freedom night is firmly in the second category, and Matt Farah, the man behind The Smoking Tire and a guy who has driven more cars than most people have owned, came back from Connecticut saying it was the wildest motorsport experience of his life. That's a high bar. When someone who has been to races across the world and behind the wheel of everything from track-prepped exotics to complete junk says a Crown Victoria race at a short oval redefined what motorsport can be, it's worth paying attention to.

Cleetus McFarland, born Garrett Mitchell, started as a YouTuber and has quietly built something that looks a lot like the future of grassroots racing. What began with buying a struggling racetrack has grown into a touring show that sells out venues and moves serious pay-per-view numbers. Farah's immediate family alone bought four subscriptions for this event. That's not a hobby anymore. Mitchell plays promoter, host, producer, and chief instigator, backed by a reportedly well-organized team and a partner named Alan Chervitz who handles the logistics. It's chaos with a very competent spine.

The format for the main event is a spec race built around post-2003 Ford Crown Victorias. Each car gets a roll cage, a racing seat, steel wheels, Nitto tires, and a dry 50-shot of nitrous oxide fed by a 10-pound bottle that gives you roughly 60 seconds of spray. No mufflers. No setup changes. No checking tire pressure. No opening the hood. The cars are made as identical as possible, and the rules enforce that parity with a hard ban on any pre-race adjustment. What you see is what you get. It's the kind of rulebook that strips away the engineering game entirely and just leaves the driving, which is either terrifying or liberating depending on how good you are.

Farah decorated his Crown Vic with help from his 5- and 6-year-old nephews, yellow base coat with an avant-kindergarten art direction, which is probably the correct aesthetic for an event where the driver's meeting includes the phrase "blast radius" and the promoter points at Ryan Preece, the NASCAR driver who won at Stafford the year before, and explains that Preece is someone you can hit, then gestures at 80-year-old Richard Childress, founder of Richard Childress Racing, and notes that Childress is someone you cannot. Ty Dillon, Childress's grandson and a NASCAR Cup Series driver, was also in the field. Late Model regulars and Formula Drift champions rounded out the professional half of a 24-car grid. The other half was influencers and motorsport-adjacent personalities, Farah included, along with Zack Klapman, BoostedBoiKyle, and others.

That mix is genuinely unusual. A field where half the drivers have won professional races and the other half are more or less novices, with no practice, no shakedown laps, and qualifying starting the first time you put the car in drive. Five laps total: one out, three flyers, one cool-down. Farah qualified P18 out of 24, which he's honest about not being an impressive number, but which planted him exactly in the mid-back chaos he was hoping for. Someone ahead of him hit the wall on the qualifying lap, which moved "don't hit the wall" well ahead of "go fast" on the priority list. That's a reasonable adjustment.

Before the Crown Vic main event, the undercard ran two races that deserve their own mention. First, a 40-plus car Nissan Altima race around a one-eighth-mile infield course, billed as 40 laps but functionally a last-car-standing survival exercise. Roughly two-thirds of the field didn't finish. The surviving cars were barely surviving. These are cars bought off Facebook Marketplace, registered, insured, and brought to the track with the sincere expectation of driving home afterward. Cleetus told Farah that the owners are always going home in a rental. Delusional, he said, but you have to love the optimism.

Then came the Van Prix. Uncaged, road-legal minivans, straight off the street, normal seats and seatbelts, no roll cages, racing on the eighth-mile oval with a portable jump thrown into the mix. The jump sends a minivan eight feet into the air and the landing is flat, nose-first, at speed. Farah watched this happen repeatedly and came away with genuine respect for minivan front suspension durability. Cleetus, watching from the sideline as another van crumpled its nose into the asphalt and kept going, noted to Farah that this particular sport has a hard out at about 24 years old. He was not wrong. The crowd, many of whom had been in line since 11 in the morning for a show that didn't start until 6 in the evening, in the heat, was completely sold on every bit of it.

What Farah is describing, and what McFarland has built, is something that the traditional motorsport establishment has struggled to manufacture for decades: genuine stakes at an accessible price point, entertainment that doesn't require a racing education to enjoy, and a crowd that's actually loud because they actually care. The sellout crowd, the pay-per-view subscriptions, the fireworks budget that Farah compared to a medium-sized city's display, none of that happens by accident. It happens because the product is honest. The cars are real. The hits are real. The fun is real. Nobody's pretending the Crown Vics are anything other than Crown Vics.

There's a version of this story where a seasoned automotive journalist goes to a hooptie race and comes back slightly condescending about it. That's not what happened. Farah drove the car, qualified the car, started mid-pack in a field full of people who would have put him into the wall without losing sleep over it, and came away calling it the wildest motorsport experience of his life. The spec format, the identical machinery, the ban on setup changes, the nitrous equalizer, all of it points toward a race won almost entirely on nerve and racecraft, not money or preparation. That's the thing grassroots racing is supposed to be, and it's rare to find it delivered this cleanly at this scale.

Whether the business model scales beyond what McFarland has already built is a genuinely interesting question. What it is right now is a sellout touring show with professional drivers sharing a grid with guys whose cars were decorated by kindergarteners. That's not a problem to be solved. That's the product.