Happy Hour: ARCA Check-in, Cleetus McFarland Buzz, Toyota Dominance & Pole Sitter Bonus Play
87 annotations
ARCA takes center stage with a check-in on momentum and viewer growth, plus a look at who’s driving the buzz—Cletus McFarland, onboard-camera plans, and track-to-track development. The hosts also zoom out to NASCAR, where Toyota’s dominance is framed through Charlotte pace, three-wide racing, and points-buffer talk around Hamlin and Reddick. Between format debates, schedule diversity, and “Pour One Out” shout-outs, the show ties driver pathways to fan engagement and future TV leverage.
0:00
--:--
03:50
Topic
ARCA Check-in
They’re giving an update on ARCA racing—what’s going well lately and why more people are paying attention. It’s basically a “where things stand right now” check-in.
04:08
Person
Cletus
Cletus McFarland is a well-known racing content creator and driver. The hosts are saying his involvement helps get more people watching ARCA races.
04:39
Term
onboard camera
An onboard camera is a camera mounted in the race car that shows what the driver sees. It helps fans feel closer to the action because you see the race from inside the car.
05:07
Topic
garage area
The garage area is where teams work on the race car between track sessions. There are usually rules about who can be where and what teams can do.
05:20
Topic
rules of engagement
They mean the basic guidelines for how things work—what’s allowed and what’s expected. It’s basically “how you’re supposed to do things” in that racing environment.
05:35
Topic
Door Bumper Clear
Door Bumper Clear is a racing podcast/show they’re referencing. They’re saying Cletus talked about this improvement there before.
13:20
Topic
ARCA Menard series graduates
The segment discusses how ARCA Menards series drivers move up, using the example that all 10 Cup-series drivers in that context also ran ARCA. It’s an argument about the feeder-series pipeline and how ARCA experience translates to higher NASCAR levels.
13:43
Topic
schedule
They’re talking about the racing schedule and how it includes lots of different kinds of tracks. The idea is that drivers get experience in many different situations.
13:48
Place
Talladega
Talladega is a top-level stock-car track known for fast racing. They’re using it as an example of the series going beyond just local tracks.
13:48
Place
Daytona
Daytona is a famous high-speed oval track used in big stock-car races. Mentioning it shows the series races on very different kinds of tracks, not just one style.
13:51
Place
Elko
Elko is another track stop they race at. It’s included to show the series isn’t limited to one type of track.
13:51
Place
Toledo
Toledo is being used as an example of a short track. Short tracks usually require more precise driving than big fast tracks.
13:51
Place
Pocono
Pocono is a well-known race track. The point here is that the series races at different kinds of tracks, so drivers and teams have to adapt.
13:56
Place
Lime Rock
Lime Rock is a road course, meaning it has turns like a typical road. The series includes tracks like this, so drivers have to handle the car differently than on ovals.
14:27
Place
Springfield
Springfield is mentioned as a dirt-track event. Dirt racing feels different because the surface grips differently than pavement.
All the rowdy fans are satting down And it still doesn't seem real after all these
days Nobody wants to get drunk and get loud Everybody just wants one more rowdy race
I look back on those good ol' rowdy days Like when it came up the radio filled with rage
You could always count on him for a bite of sound But it ain't the same without rowdy around
And all the rowdy fans are satting down
Welcome on in ladies and gentlemen to another edition of the Front Tritch Happy Hour Program. I am your host, Mr. Brian Nolan.
Great stuff as always from Mr. Michael Massey. He is one half of my co-host with me. So I'm going to bring him in right now at M-Massie22.
Massey, I hope you are feeling better. Do you sound better than last week? I know you were a little bit worse for the wear last week. How are you, buddy?
Hey, I think I sound better, but I don't know. You sound the same.
You could hear me sick a little bit in that song right there, but I had to do a tribute to Kyle Busch because we didn't do one last week.
The whole show was a tribute to Kyle Busch last week, but no song. But yeah, great to be here. Great to be feeling a lot better than not doing the show for my deathbed like I was last week.
And yeah, we got some fun yesterday.
Yeah, unfortunately for Dalton Hopkins, he is not going to experience this awesome program. He is currently on vacation with his fiance.
So hopefully he has a great time in Disneyland and we will talk with him next week, but we're going to bring in one of our other hosts that is a podcaster for Front Tritch.
He is the host of Through the Gears, Michael Abela Feini. Did I say your last name right, Michael? This is the first time I said it.
If I didn't, please correct me, my friend.
Very close. I almost got there, Brian. It was Bella Femmini.
Oh, Bella Femmini. Okay.
Goodness. It is awesome to have you on. Thank you so much and welcome to Happy Hour, man.
Appreciate it, guys. Great to be on. Looking forward to the talkers tonight.
Now, I'm going to bring in our guest. This guy could probably go toe to toe in statistics of ARCA with one of our ARCA guys, Mr. Mark Crystal.
That is the man that runs all of the ARCA stuff for us, the media, Mr. Charlie Crawl.
Charlie, thank you so much, my friend. First and foremost, I'm going to get a text from this man.
But how in the world do you tolerate Mark Crystal?
It can be a challenge sometimes. And just to be quite frank, I am the guy who corrects all of Mark's ARCA statistics, so there you have it.
Okay. I love it. I love that. I'm waiting for the text, Mark, because I know it's going to happen.
But in all seriousness, thanks for coming on. It feels like ARCA has really taken a huge momentum boost.
Why is it and why is the answer going to be Cletus?
Well, it certainly is Cletus. He has helped us with bringing in a lot of eyeballs, which is a very good thing.
Regardless of what racing series you are, you never have enough people watching.
Cletus has raced with us a couple of times already this year. Daytona and Talladega, he was really, really strong at Talladega.
He's going to come and run with us at Michigan this week. And I think we're going to have some eyeballs watching us there.
He'll have an onboard camera, which benefits him, which benefits us.
He's a very interesting character. He's a very interesting person.
I think we had some speed bumps with Cletus very early on, and that was just part of him getting acclimated to how this is going to work.
What are the rules in the garage area? What are the rules out on the racetrack?
When can I be in character? When should I not be in character type stuff?
Now that he knows basically what the rules of engagement are, and now that he has had some time racing another series,
I think you will see him take a very big step in his performance level here.
I know he talked about that a little bit with Freddy Kraft and Tommy Baldwin on Door Bumper Clear.
I do. I think you'll see a big step in his performance.
And I think the better he runs in any race that he's in, the more of his fans are going to be watching,
and the better off everybody is going to be at least in the very short term.
Cletus has been a mini-boon for the Arkham and Art series.
In addition to that, I think just in general, we've been in an uptick.
We've had increased car counts at just about every race the last couple of years.
Sometimes that's one car. Sometimes it's six or seven cars.
You know, that's a big atta boy needs to go out to the competition guys that work with us day in and day out
that are just really pounding the pavement and trying to get more cars to show up each and every week.
You know, I think this is just my personal opinion.
More cars on the racetrack generally leads to more action,
and that leads to more exciting races and better broadcasts.
And, you know, it just gives us all a lot more to talk about and to be excited about.
Yeah. So, Charlie, the Taupega race, I view that as probably the greatest Arkham race that I've ever watched
just because it was so exciting.
But the outside of just Cletus, there's so many good storylines.
It feels like an arc of this year because I think about the end of that race yet Isabella Robusto
trying to become the first woman to went Taylor Reimer as well right there.
You got Destiny Spurlock that's in the field first black woman.
Obviously, Andy Jay won the race. That's a really cool story in and of himself.
Do you feel blessed this year that like the Arkham field has so many cool stories going on outside of just Cletus?
Absolutely. You mentioned a lot of them.
You know, I remember when Andy came in, you know, kind of with his own self-financed race car
and it was just a bunch of him and a bunch of his friends.
And, you know, it seemed like such an insurmountable hill for him to climb to get to where he was going to be able to contend for a win.
And he's there. You know, he was in victory lane.
And I know that it meant so much to him from, you know, from where he started and to the to the class motorsports team from where they started.
What a terrific story that is. Anybody who does not know who Andy Jay Kowieck is, please look him up.
It's a terrific, terrific story.
And there was a reason why Cletus came to victory lane and gave him a big hug.
You know, those two raced really hard.
They raced with a lot of respect and those two have a lot in common.
You know, just personally, they live that life on the edge.
And they're both kind of wild and unpredictable at times, too.
So that's really, really cool.
Some of the other stories, Destiny's Burlach Destiny is such a neat inspirational story.
You know, who would have thought 75 years into into our existence that we'd have the first black female driver, you know, it's you would have thought that that would have happened a long time ago.
She's done a really nice job for the level of experience that she came in with, which was really not a lot on oval track.
She's got a very long racing resume, just not a lot as far as oval track racing was concerned.
So she's done a really nice job.
She's had two really strong races at Kansas.
I think we're going to see her have another really nice race there at Michigan.
Some of the other female drivers, as you mentioned, Isabella, Taylor Reimer, Laney Bice back with us this week at Michigan.
Laney had a terrific race the last time she was with us.
And not just in the Arkham & Ard series, but in the Arkham & Ard East and West, you've got some really great stories there as well.
The championship battle, I think in the East series is going to be pretty interesting watching, you know, the 77 and the 18 teams go at it, both for the driver's championship and the owner's championship.
You know, it's just going to be a lot of fun all the way around.
Charlie, the battle in the main series is heating up, too, with a couple of guys that have been in the O'Reilly series.
They dropped down and they're running in the top three, Ryan Vargas, Thomas Nunziata, fellow Jersey guy.
I see him on social media, too.
I like his stuff, but you have those guys and then you have guys in the truck series and the O'Reilly series.
You kind of see it mixing series.
How great is that to see guys like Gio Rosiero come down and Daniel Dai, Connor Mozac and kind of, you know, that iron sharpens iron type of thing that we see and with cup drivers going out of the rally kind of just trickles down.
Yeah, it's really neat and that's been the hallmark of the series for most of the last 40 years is this really is the preeminent training ground for drivers who would like to go and take that next step.
Somebody like Gio Rosiero, somebody like Thomas Nunziata.
You know, on any given race day in one of the top three national series, whether this trucks O'Reilly or cup, 80% of those drivers have raced with us in some form or fashion.
And I couldn't tell you the number of wins those drivers have generated in the national series.
It's in the hundreds.
It's in the thousands, you know, when it comes to top fives and it's in the tens of thousands when it comes to top 10 finishes.
You know, Arca has been a terrific proving ground over the years.
So when you need to get laps at a place like Michigan to help you race your truck, that's exactly why Gio Rosiero is here.
He's going to get come and run, you know, 200 miles in race conditions against a pretty stout field.
You know, and, you know, we saw Thomas Nunziata do that last year at Labrock.
You know, that helped him, you know, gain some road racing experience for when he was racing in the O'Reilly series later on in the season.
You know, this it's it's great to see these drivers come through, you know, selfishly, I wish we would have them a little longer.
You know, somebody like a Jesse Love.
We were blessed with Jesse racing with us from the time he was 15 all the way through his 18th birthday.
But there are a lot of these guys we might only get for a portion of a year, you know, before they're they're old enough to go and make that leap into the next big series.
So, you know, that's kind of the downside to it is we don't get to hold on to them for very long.
But it is great to see these young drivers and these drivers looking to make their their way up into the next level.
And we take a lot of pride in the fact that a lot of these drivers, the vast overwhelming majority of these drivers make a pit stop with us on their way up that ladder.
Yeah, I'm looking at arcarracing.com, Charlie, and you guys wrote an article about the Arkham Nard series graduates, how they finished at Charlotte.
All 10 drivers in the Cup series came and ran in the Arca Menard series.
I mean, that is that if that says something about your series, I don't I don't know what does that's incredible there.
But a couple more things here before we transition into more more cleatest talk.
I want to talk about your schedule because your schedule is something unlike any other series that I know.
You guys go to the big tracks like Daytona and Talladega.
You go to the big tracks like Michigan and Pocono, but you also go to like short tracks like Toledo and Elko.
You go to road course like Lime Rock.
You also go to a dirt track in the Illinois State Fairgrounds and the Decorate Fairgrounds.
Two day tracks, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, is your series the most dynamic, most unique series in terms of the schedule and in terms of the different types of racetracks?
I like to think so.
You know, we only have 20 races on the calendar, but I think in that 20 races, it's the most diverse schedule that you're going to see in a national touring series stock car division.
You know, from the little bull ring at Elko to Salem, Berlin and Toledo, you know, you've got a couple of road courses in there in Lime Rock and Watkins London to dirt tracks, Springfield and DuCoin.
All of the super speedways that we go to, Daytona, Talladega, Michigan, Kansas, Chicagoland.
The only thing I think we're missing is that street race and I'm all for it.
You know, trust me, if we could get added to the return of the Chicago street race, I think that would just be terrific.
But yeah, I think we really do.
I think we have the most diverse schedule.
And I think, you know, when you look at where the east and the west go to as well, you know, Sonoma and Portland are the two road courses that we run out west.
You know, the bull rings on the West series are just fantastic.
You know, we've got the Napa Auto Parts, Greg Biffle Memorial 150 coming up this week in a Tri-City Raceway.
That is one of the neatest racetracks in the entire country.
A true three turn tri oval half mile racetrack right at the base of the Red Mountains.
It's just absolutely incredible.
Just the scenery and the racetrack itself.
You know, the east, although four of those races are combination races with the Arkham and Art series, having Hickory and Rockingham and Flat Rock Speedway, one of my home tracks up here in the Midwest, just such a neat schedule.
You know, people ask me all the time, well, what's your what's your favorite race on on the calendar?
It's literally is like whatever one's coming up next, because every one of these races is cool.
Every one of these racetracks is special.
And I really do just have a blast going to each and every one of them.
You mentioned the Chicago Street course.
Is there another like dream track that you personally you the talking is you the race fan?
Is there a dream racetrack you'd want to go to?
That is a really great question.
I haven't thought about it like that.
You know, I've been I've been very fortunate that that we do get to go to a lot of the racetracks that I think are pretty cool.
You know, we go to Winchester Speedway off and on over the course of the last, you know, eight or 10 years.
We've been to Anderson Speedway, a neat little quarter mile bull ring just north of Indianapolis, a handful of times, particularly late 90s, early 2000s.
It's been a while I enter since a neat little place that I wouldn't mind going back to.
Boy, that is a tough one.
I think, you know, all of the racetracks that we go to are are pretty cool.
You know, I'm on the west side of things.
I wouldn't mind going back to like Orange Show Speedway just outside of Los Angeles.
I think that's a pretty cool track, San Bernardino.
I wouldn't mind getting back up to Evergreen Speedway up in Monroe, Washington with the East series.
I think it would be fun to get back up into the Northeast a little bit like Stafford or Thompson or Star Speedway, some of those traditional old racetracks.
But I think on the Arkham and Ard series side, I can't think of a racetrack that we don't currently go to that wasn't always one of my favorites.
You know, I'm pretty satisfied with how that's gone.
You're missing one.
You're missing Meridian Speedway in Idaho, Charlie.
Yep.
That would be neat to go back to.
I know.
That's right.
That would be cool.
I know.
I've been waiting.
Michael, do you have anything or do you want to, should we go to our next topic?
I would just say real quick about schedule talks always awesome.
I was wondering if on the OEM side, if the Dodge return to the trucks has sparked any conversations of any possible OEMs being interested in jumping back into Arca and Dodge left in the end of the 2010s.
So we have heard a little bit of conversation.
I am not involved in those meetings, so I'm probably not the guy to speak about those things.
But yeah, there has been some conversation with Dodge making their re-entry into, or Ram specifically making the re-entry into the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
You know, having a Dodge entry in the Arkham and Art series would, you know, help bolster their driver development program.
And I think that's what they're looking to do perhaps somewhere in the future.
I don't know how serious those conversations are.
I don't know, you know, what their timeframe would be, but it would not surprise me to see that happen.
I just don't know what the timeframe on that would be.
Before we dive on into our last topic, the man, the myth legend, Mr. Mark Crystal, says it's tough to write an article saying these race tracks need to be on an Arca series schedule because it is so diverse.
But he would love to see Martinsville or selfishly Newport added to the schedule.
Yeah, Newport's a neat race track.
Okay.
So big thanks to Mark for sending in that comment.
Let's dive on into our second topic of the evening.
Massey, what is on your mind, my friend?
Well, we're going to talk some more Cletus McFarland.
He made another O'Reilly Auto Part Series start this week.
And I guess, you know, he's going to race trucks and Arca at Michigan this weekend.
So first off, I guess, how do you gentlemen thought?
How did you think he did this past week in Nashville?
And where do you think he stands on approval process?
Do you think he's ready for, you know, more starts in O'Reilly, bigger super speedways?
Or should he have more Arca races?
Charlie, we can start with you.
Where do you think, where do you see him at as development wise right now?
Well, selfishly, I think I look at it from a little more of a pragmatic frame of mind.
You know, Cletus comes in with not a lot of like full-bodied stock car experience.
You know, he's got a lot of experience racing, you know, those Crown Vicks.
Podcasters are embedding Car Curious to show their listeners every car, term, and reference
FIRST EMBED PARTNER
To All The Cars I've Loved Before
"B-roll for audio"
— Doug Kay, Host
Every episode is someone's relationship with a car they've owned. Doug and his co-hosts have covered hundreds of cars across decades of automotive culture.
A twisting force that causes rotation. More torque = quicker acceleration.
Horsepower
Power output
Rev limiter
Engine protection
Coming Soon
Learn on the go
Get real-time explanations while you listen. Our mobile app shows annotations exactly when they're mentioned, so you never miss what they're talking about.
Get notified when the app launches. No spam, ever.
We use cookies to keep you logged in and remember your preferences.
See our Privacy Policy for details.
