The Stadium Super Trucks‘ maiden trip to Bristol Motor Speedway will be a unique one. Held in conjunction with Cleetus McFarland‘s Bristol 1000, five of the thirteen drivers entered are media personalities like McFarland and have never raced in SST.
Netflix Hyperdrive star Fielding Shredder and DemolitionRanch’s Matt Carriker will respectively drive the #007 and #.50, and both are the first in SST history to have numbers in which the first digit is a 0. With his decimal point (presumably in reference to the M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun, a nod to his gun-centric YouTube channel), Carriker also joins a rare group of drivers whose numberplates contain other characters, a company that includes Jeff Hoffman/Travis Milburn’s #50:1 in 2017, Jett Noland’s #66x in 2020, and Stanton Barrett‘s #F26 at Nashville last month. Shredder, who has shifted to running his YouTube channel since his contract with Netflix ended, will be in the Continental Tire truck.
Derek Bieri of Vice Grip Garage will pilot the #52 with sponsorship from PEAK Performance and BlueDEF. The Diesel Brothers, “Diesel Dave” Kiley and Dave “Heavy D” Sparks, run an automotive channel but are perhaps more known for their Discovery Channel television series of the same name.
Carriker’s DemolitionRanch has the most YouTube subscribers of the sextet’s main channels by a wide margin with eleven million, followed by McFarland’s three million. McFarland will hope to turn around his luck after crashing out in both of his SST weekends at Long Beach and Nashville.
The remaining seven drivers are all series regulars led by Robby Gordon, who returns to SST after skipping Mid-Ohio and Nashville due to overseas business obligations with SPEED UTV. He is the only driver in the field to have prior racing experience at Bristol, having competed on the traditional oval layout twice annually from 2000 to 2011 as a full-time NASCAR Cup Series driver with a best finish of twelfth in 2004.
While racing is their main background, Max Gordon and Ben Maier also operate YouTube channels; the two youngest drivers in the grid, Gordon has four thousand subscribers to Maier’s 21K. After sporting Honda Marine and Holiday Rambler on his truck for the past three rounds, Maier will have Winnebago aboard the #67.
Gavin Harlien enters as the points leader with a nineteen-point advantage over Gordon. Robert Stout sits third, thirty-one points back of Harlien. Zoey Edenholm and Bill Hynes complete the grid and also maintain social media presences, with the former vlogging about her racing activities while the latter runs the ThrillCast podcast.
Qualifying and Race #1 will take place on Saturday, 3 September, while Race #2 is on Sunday at 2 PM Eastern. Robby Gordon, Bieri, Carriker, McFarland, and the Diesel Brothers are competing in both the trucks and the Bristol 1000.
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