Cleetus McFarland is not the guy who gets quiet. Loud engines, packed crowds, big swings, that is his personality. But during a July 8, 2026, interview on Kenny Wallace’s YouTube channel, something was different. He was carrying the weight of grief, and it showed.
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“I’m okay. I’m sad about everything, and I’m just trying to keep my head up.”
Losing two close mentors in five months will do that to a person. McFarland deals with his grief by staying busy. He made that clear when talking about the late NASCAR legend Greg Biffle.
“I think about what he would want us to do,” McFarland said. “I definitely don’t think he’d want us to sit around and cry about it. Let’s go racing. Let’s keep the momentum alive.”
The hard part is keeping that momentum without the person who helped create it. Greg Biffle died on December 18, 2025. A Cessna 550 went down shortly after takeoff in Statesville, North Carolina. Seven people were on board, including Greg Biffle, his wife Cristina, and their two kids. They were flying to Florida for the holidays to visit McFarland.
The two met through Polaris, where Biffle worked as a brand ambassador. He showed up at one of McFarland’s events at the Freedom Factory; they hit it off, and that was it. Then there was Hurricane Helene in 2024; both of them flew helicopter missions into cut-off mountain communities, dropping supplies and airlifting people out. That trip locked in something permanent between them.
Greg Biffle became McFarland’s racing mentor. When McFarland said he wanted to race the Daytona 500, Biffle did not encourage it. He said that it is just not possible, explained the drafting, the speed, the danger, and mapped out a smarter path through the ARCA Menards Series first. By December 2025, the 2026 plan was already in place.
“We’d planned to run Daytona and a couple of other races,” McFarland told Wallace. “Biff was going to race ARCA with me. He was going to be in a car at Daytona. Those things would’ve just been a lot more fun with him there.”
McFarland went anyway. He carried “Be Like Biff” on the rear bumper of his No. 30 Ford, finished 11th in the ARCA race, and ran the Truck Series event at Daytona with Niece Motorsports. Every bit of it followed the plan Greg Biffle had drawn up for him.
But before McFarland could fully process Biffle’s death, tragedy struck again. Kyle Loftis, the founder of 1320Video, died on May 5, 2026. He was 43. Without Loftis, there is no Cleetus McFarland. Simple as that.
Back in 2009, Loftis hired a young Garrett Mitchell to work part-time for 1320Video. Years later, during a 2015 racing event in Texas, the two filmed a throwaway joke. Mitchell put on a thick country accent, pointed at a Corvette, and hollered about freedom. Loftis posted it. It blew up. The Cleetus McFarland character was born that day.
Loftis had been filming street racing since 2003 with a point-and-shoot camera. He turned that into four million subscribers and a genuine community. When McFarland’s own following started growing, Loftis did not hold him back. He pushed him to start his own channel and then helped him figure out how to run it.
“We always try to spread the word about who he was and who Kyle was,” McFarland said.
Two people who built him, one who gave him the persona, and one who gave him the racing direction, were gone within months of each other. Staying in motion is how McFarland copes. Right now, it might also be the only thing holding him together.