TOAST OF CANBERRA
AMERICAN YOUTUBE STAR CLEETUS MCFARLAND BROUGHT HIS ‘TOAST’ CAMARO TO SUMMERNATS TO TRY HIS HAND AT BURNOUTS OZ-STYLE
CLEETUS Mcfarland (aka Garrett Mitchell) is one of the biggest names in the Youtube world for car nuts, amassing a huge following in only a few years with his love of turbos, V8s, Mountain Dew and all things freedom. His most famous car is Leroy, a twin-turbo, seven-second manual Corvette (not that there’s much ’Vette left) that launched him into stardom.
Summernats 33 was Cleetus’s third time at the event, but this time he decided to take his ’Nats game to a new level by building and shipping his own car all the way from the US to take on the Burnout Masters. What resulted was a hastily prepared third-gen Camaro dubbed TOAST, sporting a monster 632ci Blueprint big-block and with a huge, freedom-inducing blower.
With such a short turnaround to get the car ready before it had to be shipped here, Cleetus hadn’t turned the wheel of the thing until he hit the pad on Thursday afternoon as part of the Last Chance Wildcard Shootout for the Burnout Masters. The skid started off swimmingly, but was cut short due to engine trauma. Not to be beaten, Cleetus and crew dug deep and found a new mill for TOAST, before sending it out for exhibition runs on Saturday and Sunday.
Alongside his burnout duties, he also took on the celebrity mower race, in which he was just beaten by local hero Shannon Noll.
We sat down with Cleetus on the last day of Summernats to discuss his love of Australia, burnouts, and what the future holds.
How has your ’Nats weekend been? Busy! We’ve been breaking stuff, fixing it, breaking it again, fixing it again and having fun.
It’s a big deal to ship a car all the way from the States for an event like this; what is it that keeps you coming back to Australia?
It’s just the volume of people here and the volume of cars. In the States we cap our events at 30 cars, and there are more than 2000 entrants here! There’s so many cool cars, so for us to get over here, it’s not like we were just going to some small event; this is like its own little country we’re in of just gearheads, and we love it.
You’ve built a big following on Youtube, with nearly two million subscribers, and a stable of killer project cars. How did you get started?
Cleetus started on a whim, just having a good time with some buddies. I made a video that happened to go viral with the 1320Video guys,
and from there it just built into something fun. We just build cars; we’re just like every other car guy – we build stuff and we do crazy stuff that we just film. A lot of these guys don’t film what they do. So we’re not different from those people; we just put it on the internet.
Tell us a bit about TOAST. You’ve it built specifically to bring over here and destroy tyres.
We wanted to choose a car that was rare over in Australia but also cheap and available in the States, because we knew we were going to destroy it – I’ve hit the wall twice already and I’m probably going to smack the wall today. It made sense to be a thirdgen Camaro, and the way we built it, with the bigblock and big blower, is just Australian-style. That’s what all the kings out here have – the higher the hat, the better it is. We’re hoping to build a crazier set-up for next year, but we did it in such a short period of time. We just put a bunch of power in a Camaro and sent it over. It’s not a true burnout car yet, but it’s close enough.
What’s it like to drive?
As far as a burnout car goes, I have absolutely no control over the car; it does whatever it wants to do. I’m in there turning the wheel and the car is just driving around. But it does smoke tyres, so I’ll give it that – that’s where it gets its 2/10 points! That’s the fun part of it though. It’s almost more fun that I’m just sending it in there with absolutely zero idea of where I’m going to end up, because that car is out of control.
Do you have plans for the ’Nats next year?
It’s hard to say what condition TOAST will be in by the end of 2020, because he’ll be going around the country doing skids in America, but maybe at that point we’ll say we need something with a shorter wheelbase, something that turns harder, and build a different car and send it back over here.