He Bought a Racetrack 6 Years Ago. Now He Runs the Netflix of Grassroots Motorsports

In 2019, Garrett Mitchell was already an internet success. His YouTube channel, Cleetus McFarland, had over a million followers. If you perused the channel at that time, you would’ve found a range of grassroots motorsport videos with the type of vehicular shenanigans that earn truckloads of views. Some of those older videos include “BLEW BY A COP AT 120+mph! OOPS!,” “THERE'S A T-REX ON THE TRACK!,” and “Manual Transmission With Paddle Shifters!?!.”

Those videos made Mitchell, aka Cleetus McFarland, a known personality among automotive enthusiasts. But the YouTuber wanted more financial independence beyond the Google platform and firms willing to sponsor his channel.

“After my YouTube was growing and some of my antics were getting videos de-monetized, I realized I needed a playground,” Mitchell told Ars Technica in an email.

Mitchell found a road toward new monetization opportunities through the DeSoto Super Speedway. The Bradenton, Florida, track had changed ownership multiple times since opening in the 1970s. The oval-shaped racetrack is three-eighths of a mile long with 12-degree banking angles.

By 2018, the track had closed its doors and was going unused. DeSoto happened to be next to Mitchell’s favorite drag strip, giving the YouTuber the idea of turning it into a stadium where people could watch burnouts and other “massive, rowdy” ticketed events. Mitchell added: “So I sold everything I could, borrowed some money from my business manager, and went all in for $2.2 million.”

But like the rest of the world, Mitchell hit the brakes on his 2020 plans during Covid-19 lockdowns. Soon after his purchase, Mitchell couldn’t use the track, renamed Freedom Factory, for large gatherings, forcing him to reconsider his plans.

“We had no other option but to entertain the people somehow. And with no other racing goin’ on anywhere, we bet big on making something happen. And it worked,” Mitchell said.

That “something” was a pay-per-view (PPV) event hosted from the Freedom Factory in April 2020. The event led to others and, eventually, Mitchell running his own subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service, FRDM+, which originally launched as Cleetervision in 2022.

Today, a FRDM+ subscription costs $20 per month or $120 per year. A subscription provides access to an impressive library of automotive videos. Some are archived from Mitchell’s YouTube channel. Other, exclusive videos feature content such as interviews with motorsport influencers and members of Mitchell’s staff and crew, and outrageous motorsport stunts. You can watch videos from other influencers on FRDM+, and the business can also white-label its platform into other influencers’ websites too.

Before Mitchell could host his first PPV event, he had to prepare the speedway. Explaining the ordeal to Ars, he wrote: “We cleaned that place up best we could, but let’s be real, it was rough. Lights were out, weeds poppin’ up through the asphalt, the whole deal.”

Pulling off the first PPV event at the Freedom Factory speedway was a “race against time,” Jonny Mill, who built FRDM+’s tech stack and serves as company president, told Ars.

“Florida implemented a statewide shutdown on the very day of our event,” he said.

Mitchell also struggled to get the right workers and equipment needed for the PPV. Flights weren’t available due to the pandemic, forcing Mill to produce the event from California using a cell phone group chat and “last-minute local crew,” per Mitchell. The ENG camera person was much shorter than Mitchell “and had to climb on whatever she could just to keep me in frame,” he recalled.

Mitchell said Freedom Factory's first PPV event had 75,000 concurrent viewers, which caused his website and those of the event sponsors to crash.

“Our initial bandwidth provider laughed at our viewership projections, and, of course, we surpassed them in the first week of presales,” Mill said. “They did apologize before asking for a much larger check.”

Other early obstacles included determining how to embed the livestream platform into Mitchell’s ecommerce site. The biggest challenge there was “juggling two separate logins, one for merch shopping and another for livestream PPV, all within the same site,” Mill explained.

“Now, our focus is on seamlessly guiding the YouTube audience over to FRDM+ for premium live events,” he added.

Live events are still the heart of FRDM+. The service had 21 livestreamed events scheduled throughout 2025, and more are expected to come.

Today, bandwidth isn’t a problem for FRDM+, and navigating the streaming service doesn’t feel much different from something like Netflix. There are different “channels” (grouped together by related content or ongoing series) on top and new releases and upcoming content highlighted below. There are horizontal scrolling rows, and many titles have content summaries and/or trailers. The platform also has a support section with instructions for canceling subscriptions.

Like with other SVOD services, subscribers can watch FRDM+ via a web browser or through a smart TV app. FRDM+ currently has apps for Apple TV, Fire OS, and Roku OS. Mitchell said the team is constantly working on more connected TV apps, as well as adding features, “more interactivity,” and customers.

To keep the wheels spinning, FRDM+ leverages a diverse range of technologies, Mill explained: “At the core of our infrastructure, AWS bandwidth servers handle the heavy lifting, while Accedo powers the connected TV apps, bridging the gap between our tech stack and the audience. Brightcove serves as our primary video player partner, with additional backup systems in place to maintain reliability.”

For a service like this, with live events, redundancy is critical, Mill said.

“At the Freedom Factory, we even beam air fiber from a house 5 miles away to ensure a reliable second internet. We also have a hidden page on [the Cleetus McFarland website] to launch a backup stream if the primary one fails,” he said.

Today, FRDM+’s biggest challenge isn’t a technical one. Instead, it's managing the business’s different parts using a small team. FRDM+ has 35 full-time employees across its Shop, Race Track, Events, and Merch divisions and is “entirely self-funded,” per Mill. The company also relies on contractors for productions, but its core livestream team has six full-time employees.

Mitchell told Ars that FRDM+ is profitable, but he couldn't get into specifics. He said the service has “strong year-over-year growth and a solid financial foundation that allows us to continue reinvesting in our team and services,” like a “robust technology stack, larger events, venue rentals, and even giving away helicopters and Lamborghinis as the prizes for our races.”

“Having been at Discovery during the launch of MotorTrend OnDemand, I’ve witnessed the power of substantial budgets firsthand,” Mill said. “Yet, FRDM+ has achieved greater success organically than Discovery did with their eight-figure marketing investment. This autonomy and efficiency are a testament to the strength of our approach.”

Any profitability for a three-year-old streaming service is commendable. Due to wildly differing audiences, markets, costs, and scales, comparing FRDM+’s financials to the likes of Netflix and other mainstream streaming services is like comparing apples to oranges. But it’s interesting to consider that FRDM+ has achieved profitability faster than some of those services, like Peacock, which also launched in 2020, and Apple TV+, which debuted in 2019.

FRDM+ doesn’t share subscription numbers publicly, but Mitchell told Ars that the subscription service has a 93 percent retention. Mill attributed that number to a loyal, engaged community driven by direct communication with Mitchell.

Mill also suggested to Ars that FRDM+ has successfully converted over 5 percent of Mitchell's YouTube audience. Five percent of Cleetus McFarland’s current YouTube base would be 212,500 people.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.