Even “Dumb Dreams” Come True: At 34, YouTuber Cody Dennison Is a Full-Time Race Car Driver
When you get to the top tiers of motorsports, most, if not nearly all, of the drivers have been racing since they were literally kids, typically in karts and quarter-midgets. The costs involved in those activities are beyond the means of many families. Simply put, not too many of today’s professional race-car drivers grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in mobile homes. It’s been a long time since backwoods moonshiners took their hopped-up sedans to NASCAR competitions on the weekends.
No matter their relative talents, Formula 1 drivers Max Verstappen and Lance Stroll are both fortunate sons. Jos, Verstappen’s father is a former F1 driver, and Stroll races for a team owned by his billionaire father. The dual advantages of starting their racing careers young and having financial support from their families are part of the stories of most high-level professional racers. Not so for 34-year-old Cody Dennison.
Four years ago, Dennison had never turned a wheel in competition. He grew up in a mobile home in Hokes Bluff, Alabama (population 4446), and racing karts or quarter midgets wasn’t in the family budget. Today, he races full-time in the semi-pro ARCA Menards Series, the feeder and development series for NASCAR’s top three series: the Camping World Truck Series, the Xfinity Series, and the pinnacle of stock car racing, the Cup Series. To use an analogy from another sport, Dennison’s situation is a bit like a Major League Baseball team signing a player in his 30s, who had never played high-level competitive baseball, to a guaranteed minor league contract. How did he get there? Believe it or not, Youtube.
Like many boys in the southeast United States, Cody was a huge NASCAR fan. As a kid, he dreamed of racing at the Talladega Superspeedway, which wasn’t far from his boyhood home in Alabama. Instead of racing, though, he ended up managing a video game store. Along the way, he launched a YouTube channel called CAMELOT331. His job at the video store ended in March of 2018, and later that year he started uploading videos about his experience in the video game industry. Dennison is an entertaining and attractive fellow, and his self-deprecating and down-home sense of humor gained him a following. In May of 2019 he posted a video discussing his departure from the store. It went viral, getting a million views overnight. Its success led to over 225,000 subscribers on YouTube as well as large followings on other social media sites.
Dennison found himself making five times as much as he had made managing the game store. The success on YouTube provided Cody with the resources to live out his childhood dream of racing a stock car. In 2022, at the age of 30, Cody bought his first race car, a Dodge that Ryan Newman raced in NASCAR’s top series in 2007. It cost him all of $27,000. “I bought the car pretty cheap,” Dennison says.
Notwithstanding the relatively modest investment and old equipment, Dennison finished in the top ten in all four races he entered, all of them with the Grand National Super Series, a Southern series that lets you race old stock cars. His best finish was fifth. The next year he ran 18 of the 22 Grand National races, mostly in his own car, but also rent-a-rides for a couple of teams. He finished sixth in the standings, with 15 top-ten finishes and two fifth places. While he’d be the first to say he’s not the most talented driver on the track, Dennison finished almost every race ahead of his qualifying position, generally staying out of trouble and bringing the cars home in one piece. Those are qualities appreciated by team owners, who don’t like DNFs and hate wrecks. Not every team can win every week. Because of finances, a lot of teams’ best hope is to finish well and make sure the sponsors’ logos get seen, and they are always looking for reliable drivers that can do that.
Dennison’s success in the Grand National Super Series earned him pre-season testing for the ARCA Menard Series in early 2024 at Daytona International Speedway, where he drove for Wayne Peterson Racing (WPR). ARCA has both regional, east and west, series as well as a national series. Drivers range from teenage rookies to racing veterans. For example, IndyCar veterans Conor Daly and Marco Andretti are racing in the ARCA Menards Series this season.
The testing at Daytona got Cody a qualifying ride with Clubb Racing but he failed to make the race; not surprising for an ARCA rookie racing on a superspeedway for the first time. Dennison tried again at Phoenix Raceway, this time for WPR, but again did not qualify. Not disheartened, he made his starting debut in the 2024 ARCA Menards Series East for WPR at Pensacola Five Flags, qualifying 12th and finishing 10th. A few weeks later, Dennison lived out part of his childhood dream. He started his first race at Talladega Superspeedway, not far from his Alabama birthplace. He finished 17th. That was followed by finishes of 12th, 16th, 11th, 10th, and 13th. His streak of finishes was broken at Iowa, when another rookie driver wrecked him into the wall.
Though he was disappointed, and even took a financial hit (drivers’ contracts sometimes include paying for some of the damage), Dennison wasn’t that upset. Prior to the Iowa race, it was announced that he would run the remainder of the full ARCA season driving for Andy Hillenburg Racing in the #11 and #10 Toyota Camry.
Dennison may sound like a good ol’ boy from Alabama, but he’s savvy about social media and knows how to use it grow an enterprise, and that know-how has resulted in his full-time professional ride. His ride at Talladega and one other race this season was crowd-funded in cooperation with comic book artist Ethan Van Sciver, who has raised millions of dollars for his Cyberfrog comics and related merchandise on Indiegogo. Over $114,000 was raised to put a Cyberfrog livery on the car and the car in the race with Cody at the wheel. Supporters were offered a special-edition comic book and a die-cast model of Cody’s race car wearing a Cyberfrog livery. Higher-level contributors got their names on the back deck of the actual race car. As you would expect, that comic-book-derived livery is one of the more engaging graphic schemes you’ll see on a race car.
Van Sciver has a popular YouTube channel that he uses to promote his comics and merchandise, which helped grow Dennison’s fan base to the point that Cody’s online fans are showing up at races to watch him compete. The linkup with Cyberfrog fans was important, but Van Sciver is relatively small time compared to Tim Pool, whose TimCast channel, which covers culture and politics and hosts notable guests, has over 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Pool also streams on Locals and Rumble. For the remainder of this racing season, Dennison’s car will sport Timcast.com livery. In addition, Dennison has picked up season-long sponsorship by online marketplace Public Square.
Dennison has aspirations to make it to NASCAR’s top-tier series, but for now he’s content to be living out his childhood dream.
“All of this was very unexpected,” Cody told Hagerty after we met up with him at the ARCA Menard’s race at Mid-Ohio in June. “Racing was never in my plan for life. Just a dumb dream that somehow became less dumb recently.”
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