Reed Timmer chases tornadoes for a living. On August 14, he pointed all of that experience at Berlin Raceway in Marne, Michigan, for something considerably slower-moving than a supercell: his first competitive car race. The event is the Michigan 100, the marquee Crown Vic race anchoring Cleetus McFarland’s weekend takeover of the historic short track, and Timmer announced his arrival the way he announces everything: on Instagram, from behind the wheel of a machine built to survive far worse than a spin through turn three.
The video shows his signature armored intercept vehicle, nicknamed Dominator, rolling around Berlin’s frontstretch under grandstands built for a very different kind of racing. Timmer signed off with “Never stop racing,” a play on the Never Stop Chasing tagline he has used for years covering hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes as a PhD meteorologist and inventor. Whether that camera-masted, spike-equipped machine is what he actually plans to wheel through Saturday’s Crown Vic field, or simply how Team Dominator made its entrance, is not clear from the clip alone. What is clear, in his own words, is that he has never done this before.
That alone says something about how far Cleetus McFarland’s Crown Vic racing has traveled from its original joke. The format started as a cheap way to fill a field with decommissioned Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors—the Panther-platform sedans are body-on-frame, live-axle, and mechanically simple enough that a used cop car and a weekend in the garage will get you a rolling race car. It has since become a legitimate draw for people who have never competed on a track in their lives. Some of McFarland’s own builds carry turbocharged versions of the factory 4.6-liter V8 well past 1,000 horsepower, which lines up with the amped-up billing Timmer gave Saturday’s race in his own post. Previous Crown Vic races under McFarland’s banner have pulled in active NASCAR Cup Series drivers Tony Stewart, Chris Buescher, and Ryan Preece, proof the format has become as much a proving ground for bravado as it is a demolition-adjacent spectacle.
Berlin Raceway itself isn’t a stunt track. It has hosted racing since 1950 and currently runs as part of NASCAR’s grassroots weekly-series ladder, the same developmental pipeline that has fed short-track talent into NASCAR’s national divisions for decades. It’s the kind of short-track heritage NASCAR’s own teams keep leaning on, as Bristol Motor Speedway’s M&M’s tribute car showed earlier this month. Two days before Timmer’s debut, McFarland himself climbed into a Super Late Model for the Tekton 250 Battle at Berlin, a legitimate 250-lap feature against drivers who race that track every week. Sunday closes the weekend with Burnout Rivals. Across three days, Berlin runs the full spectrum from serious short-track competition to a police-car brawl with a storm chaser in the field, a range of programming that echoes the same logic behind NASCAR’s own points-race-for-exhibition swap at North Wilkesboro.
None of this happens without McFarland’s audience, and that’s the more interesting story underneath the Instagram clip. Short tracks like Berlin have spent years fighting for Saturday-night attendance as local racing ages out and grandstands empty. McFarland’s YouTube-native events, funded by merchandise and sponsorships rather than a sanctioning body’s purse, inject an entirely different fan base into buildings that might otherwise be running in front of a few hundred regulars. Whether that turns into lasting Saturday-night crowds once the Crown Vics leave town is a fair question, but track operators anywhere in short-track racing would take the gate receipts first and worry about retention later.
Storm chasing and stock car racing share less in common than Timmer’s joke suggests. Closing speed on a supercell tops out well under highway limits, and a Crown Vic field at Berlin will be running considerably faster than that, with a lot more traffic to read in a lot less space. Whether his instincts for tracking chaos at a distance translate to reading a run-off lane is something Saturday will answer. It’s also worth remembering that NASCAR’s actual Cup Series regulars are working an entirely different kind of Saturday night this same weekend at Richmond Raceway, a reminder that American stock car racing still operates on wildly different scales, sometimes on the same weekend, four hundred miles apart.
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