-
Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
If you are anything like me (and considering you are reading this story on the ESPN NASCAR page, I’m assuming that we share at least one pretty sizable common interest), then you are someone who has to fight the temptation to peek ahead at the ending before we get there. You sneak a look at the final pages of a book or the final frame of a Sunday comic. You struggle to not look up the box score of a sporting event you aren’t able to watch live, ultimately too impatient to wait until you get home to fire up the DVR.
I genuinely try to be all about the journey versus the destination, but that’s an impossible mindset to adhere to when you know that destination is so astronomically huge that it might very well alter the way lives are lived and business is conducted from that moment of arrival into all the moments that follow.
That is exactly the type of destination that stock car racing finds itself journeying toward now, following a road map disguised as legal documents. In a court battle that officially began a week and a half ago, NASCAR is being challenged by one of this millennium’s greatest racers, the greatest basketball player who has ever lived and a longtime NASCAR team owner who, like nearly all who came before him, has raced with the twin goals of winning trophies on Sunday and trying to break even at season’s end.
Team 23XI and Front Row Motorsports versus NASCAR and its chairman, Jim France, is a battle over power, money and the truth. An antitrust claim that the defendants have entirely too much of the first two and have never shared enough of the third. Beneficiaries of what the plaintiffs say is an antiquated dictatorship of a business model, fundamentally unchanged since France’s father, NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., Jedi mind-tricked a roomful of racers into handing him unfettered control of their newly formed sanctioning body on Feb. 21, 1948.
Oh, and while one side files injunctions (as 23XI co-owner Denny Hamlin & Co. did on Wednesday) and the other side files to have the hearings surrounding those injunctions delayed (which NASCAR did in response), all parties involved, not to mention all those who will be affected by whatever outcome this all ultimately leads to, are also working and racing in the super-tight quarters of the Cup Series garage.
Hamlin is fourth in the NASCAR playoffs, driving for Joe Gibbs, who is among the vast majority of team owners who signed NASCAR’s charter agreement last month — the same one that Hamlin refused to ratify. Meanwhile, Hamlin’s 23XI employee Tyler Reddick is seventh in those standings. There are only four races remaining before a champion is crowned, and they are both title contenders.
It is awkward. It is weird. It is unprecedented … well, sort of unprecedented.
If you know your NASCAR history, then you also appreciate the timing of it all. The antitrust suit was filed on Wednesday, Oct. 2, just as the sport was headed to Talladega Superspeedway (if you were expecting a retraction of my column about that date, feel free to keep waiting).
The Talladega racetrack opened in 1969, and during its very first Cup Series (then Grand National) weekend, the superstars of the garage staged a boycott, claiming that NASCAR and Big Bill France had rushed the place open, creating a 2.66-mile monster that was unsafe for their cars and tires. The just-formed Professional Drivers Association, led by Richard Petty, walked out of the garage the Saturday afternoon prior to the Talladega 500, essentially telling France, “Just try to run this race without us.”
He did just that, even wheeling a few laps himself to openly question their guts. Then he recruited racers from lower divisions with the dual incentives of cash and a chance to break into the big leagues. Among them was a youngster named Richard Childress, who used that cash to start the team he still owns today. The following week, the stars were back in the garage and the PDA was on its way to extinction.
Now, as the second round of courthouse paperwork was just filed, the Cup Series rolls into Charlotte Motor Speedway. It was the building of that track in 1960 that led its co-founder Curtis Turner — like Hamlin, a top-of-his-game racing star from Virginia — to seek help paying the construction costs. He found it from the Teamsters and its leader, Jimmy Hoffa, in exchange for the formation of the Federation of Professional Athletes, a drivers union that demanded of NASCAR better pay, medical benefits and the establishment of horse track-style betting on auto racing.
France Sr. scared off most of the drivers during a dramatic pre-race meeting in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Turner and fellow living legend Tim Flock held out, received lifetime bans, and failed in court to have those bans lifted. As Flock recalled to me in 1998: “We went down there to Daytona with all these super-high-powered, high-dollar New York lawyers, and those country lawyers of Bill France’s just whipped ’em. Our guys would be pouring their hearts out in the courtroom, and the judge would be sitting up there reading comic books and magazines. We never had a chance.”
Both of those instances happened a very long time ago, but the mentality behind them has not. Big Bill France never lost. Neither did his son and chairmanship heir, Bill France Jr. They ruled by way of “our way or hit the highway,” and it worked. They argued it worked for everyone, and rarely did anyone question that because, yeah, it usually did.
“Do I get mad at NASCAR? Hell yeah, I get mad at them all the time,” Hall of Famer Rusty Wallace explained in 2002, the last time the sanctioning body found itself caught up in an antitrust case. “But as Bill Junior likes to remind me, whenever I have to go down to Daytona to argue with NASCAR about something, I do it in one of my private planes and then I eat dinner at a five-star restaurant after the meeting and fly in another one of my planes home to sleep in my giant house on the lake.”
That lawsuit is the only known time that NASCAR lost a major court case, organized by investors in Speedway Motorsports Incorporated, the parent company of Charlotte Motor Speedway and a portfolio of other racetracks. Among them Texas Motor Speedway, which had only one Cup Series date, believed it should have more and also believed that NASCAR’s monolithic ways — see: International Speedway Corporation, its own massive racetrack ownership division — wielded too much power when it came to how the stock car pie was sliced. NASCAR chose to settle out of court, a move that led to a shifting of Cup Series race dates and ultimately the closing of the North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham.
A big motivation to take the settlement was for NASCAR to keep its financial books from being spilled into the open. A couple of decades later, the 23XI/Front Row case threatens to do the same.
Why the history lesson? Because past is always prologue, and it also provides insight into the mindsets that will be carried into this antitrust case, no matter how long it lasts.
Hamlin has always been a forward thinker, a fact revealed by even the most casual glance at 23XI’s futuristic new race shop, known as Airspeed. He is, after all, the man who finally convinced Michael Jordan to invest in NASCAR, after His Airness flirted with the idea for years but was never ready to commit. Now he is, and thanks to even further evidence of forward thinking, the stated motivation of helping Bubba Wallace continue to break ground as a Black racer.
While it is easy and fair to question Jordan’s prowess as an NBA executive when it comes to winning games, his business acumen is almost as impressive as his Chicago Bulls ring collection. He hasn’t played a competitive game of hoops in 21 years, yet his Jordan brand of athletic gear did $6.5 billion of business last year. In 2010, he bought majority ownership of the Charlotte Hornets for $275 million. Last year he sold the team for $3 billion. His net worth is more than $3.5 billion.
On the other side of the case is Jim France, a painfully shy man who ascended to this chairmanship almost by accident. He was perfectly happy to let brother Bill Junior be the growling, smoky face and voice of the sport, while he worked quietly behind the scenes in Daytona during the week and raced his sports cars on the weekend. His net worth isn’t Jordan’s, but it’s more than most, estimated at $1.8 billion.
When the original and historic charter agreement was negotiated and agreed to by NASCAR and its teams back in 2016, Jim France seemed happy to let it happen without a lot of involvement. With the contract expiration date looming this year, though, the 79-year-old was suddenly found blocking the door, even standing in front of his own employees who seemed to honestly believe the new deal was nearly done. The impasse contentiously ground through winter, spring and summer, growing even more tense when NASCAR’s new $7.7 billion media rights deal was announced in late 2023 and teams were still a little taken aback at their piece of the pie chart.
The final move — and to Hamlin’s team, the final kick in the teeth — came on Sept. 6, when teams received a take-it-or-leave-it charter agreement on a Friday afternoon and were told they had to sign it and return it by the close of the business day. Some numbers were better, others were worse, but it was the deadline that landed wrong, even with the 16 other teams who ultimately signed off.
It was a very Bill France move, Sr. and Jr. Jim France, who refused to comment on it all at Talladega last weekend, looks like a man who is committed to defending not just a way of business, but also a strand of DNA. While that mentality worked in 1948, 1960, 1969 and all the way up until 2016, does it still work in 2024?
That is the question of this entire case.
Hamlin says he wants transparency. Jordan, who unlike so many here-and-gone celebrity NASCAR team owners seems by every indication to be in this for the long haul, says he is looking out for the little guy. Front Row owner Bob Jenkins says he is tired of going broke.
They believe that because NASCAR owns the series and the majority of the tracks, while also writing and rewriting the rulebook, requiring teams to purchase parts from NASCAR-approved suppliers to adhere to that rulebook, while prohibiting teams from participating in other series without NASCAR’s approval, while also restricting revenue distribution … all of that added up violates antitrust law. In short, they believe NASCAR controls too much, and that the new 2025 charter agreement does little to change that.
Now they have hired not simply an antitrust lawyer to aid them in the pursuit of those wants, they have hired the antitrust lawyer. Jeffrey Kessler is the man in the suit behind the curtain who led the NBA into free agency on behalf of Oscar Robertson in 1976. He did the same in the NFL as the attorney for Freeman McNeil. Earlier this year, Kessler was the tip of the legal spear that finally poked a giant hole in the NCAA, paving the way for the payment of college athletes, present and past. He’s the guy who defended Tom Brady in the “Deflategate” case.
Kessler makes his living defeating sports leagues who aren’t used to being defeated and changing business models that were believed to be immune to alteration. And while NASCAR and Jim France continue to lean on precedents set in their favor from six decades ago, the bat that Kessler swings was carved in 1890, the Sherman Antitrust Act that keeps big business in check by making it illegal to form monopolies or restrain free trade.
A pair of sides who never lose. A pair of business doctrines that come from totally different eras. A driver, an owner and a basketball player versus the group that governs the sport they love. No matter what happens, NASCAR will never be the same.
Can you blame us for wanting to fast forward to the end?