Years ago, I was in the garage at Darlington Raceway chatting with David Pearson, Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough. These three are among the greatest racers NASCAR History. All three had long since retired as drivers, but all three had recently given up trying to become Cup Series team owners, an experience that had crushed them all financially.
“You’re looking at three NASCAR dinosaurs,” Yboro told me.
Pearson laughingly replied, “But we’re doing better than the dinosaurs because we’re still here.”
When I asked him what he discovered that dinosaurs didn’t understand, Ellison said, “We were smart enough to realize we were dinosaurs and get out before we went extinct.”
Thursday afternoon at a Charlotte courthouse, another NASCAR dinosaur went out badly.
As an antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR, filed by 23XI Racing, co-owned by Michael Jordan and three-time Daytona 500 winner denny hamlinand Front Row Motorsports (FRM) began to make their way into their second weekend, with both sides announcing that they reached an agreement,
As the specifics of the agreement were still emerging late in the afternoon, there was no doubt that victory belonged to the teams over the sanctioning body as we already knew that their ultimate goal had been achieved. Ultimately, it was about his fight for NASCAR to make the team charter, closer to that of a stock car racing stick-and-ball franchise, permanent – or as his lawyer Jeffrey Kessler described it, “evergreen” – as opposed to the contract-to-contract model, renewed in conjunction with NASCAR’s massive media rights deals.
It’s very difficult to find someone in the Cup Series paddock who doesn’t believe this is the right move. In fact, every team in the Cup Series garage once sided with 23XI and FRM, though they eventually relented and were willing to let those two teams advance in the battle alone. They won that battle, and as a result, so did every NASCAR team owner lucky enough to own one of those 36 charters. Nobody calls it franchising, but that’s essentially what it is now, in line with the business model of almost every other major league sport, such as Jordan’s long-term home. nba,
NASCAR lost that battle. As the lawsuit progressed, defeat seemed inevitable, which is why Jordan and his team believed that the latest charter agreement, which they refused to sign in September 2024, was unsatisfactory. One reason is that everyone in that garage, including NASCAR’s commissioner and president, had already spoken out behind closed doors and in the emails and texts that surfaced during and around the trial — but no one spoke out publicly until the lawsuit forced them to do so.
The door to the future was being blocked by a dinosaur.
Jim France is a good man, a brilliant businessman, and someone who loves auto racing to a level that few can understand. But he never wanted the job he now has as CEO and president of NASCAR. His father, Bill France, started the position after overseeing NASCAR’s founding meetings in 1948. His older brother, Bill France Jr., took over those duties from their father in the early 1970s and ruled the game with a highly respected iron fist for three decades. He was succeeded by his son Brian, who had a short tenure at best and ended prematurely in 2018.
During all this, the famously introverted Jim France was happy staying in the background, racing sports cars and working in the racetrack ownership division, while enjoying much of the influence in the NASCAR boardroom without much of the public spotlight that both his father and brother loved so much and his nephew so loathed.
But when Brian France stepped down and NASCAR’s leadership flowchart unexpectedly distorted, it went straight to Jim France’s desk, whether he wanted it or not. “The Steves,” NASCAR Commissioner Phelps and Chairman O’Donnell, have been the faces of that leadership, a constant paddock presence when meeting with the media and their teams. But the two were always quick to politely remind that whatever decisions they made or steps they took, they were all taken through family first, through Jim, niece Lesa France Kennedy and their son Ben.
When it came to the introduction of charters in 2016 it was clear to everyone in the sport, a concept was created to help team owners meet their financial demands. It became even more clear that everything runs through France when the tug-of-war for the latest Charter agreement took place in the two years that followed the current agreement.
As revealed in court, NASCAR’s most powerful team owners personally requested France to make their case for a more favorable charter agreement. Asked this week about those meetings, France testified that he considered them all very good friends, but that he was not impressed by their arguments.
As was also revealed in court, people working for France were frustrated by repeated attempts to get the deal greenlighted with those bosses, but were rebuffed by a man they were apparently referring to in text messages such as “1996… dictatorship”, although he refused to identify it as France during his time on the stand.
At some point during all that, Jim France finally realized that, no, this isn’t 1996, when his brother steered the game toward an unparalleled decade of growth. Nor was it 1966, when his father was building and collecting the portfolio of speedways that still form the backbone of NASCAR and the France family fortune. It’s not even 2016, when charters were born.
Instead, we are looking towards 2026. Today’s world is an open book. There are no secrets. No one knows this better than NASCAR and its race teams, who during this trial exposed the closed-door/closed-book way of doing business for 77 years. For the first time, we now know how much teams and their drivers make – and how much they lose – and we know how much cash flows into the sanctioning body’s Daytona headquarters and the France family’s bank accounts.
And when it comes to collateral damage, race fans are justifiably angry that NASCAR’s commissioner called Richard Childress, who teamed up with Dale Earnhardt to win six Cup titles, a “stupid scoundrel.” We now know that three-time Super Bowl-winning coach and five-time Cup Series champion owner Joe Gibbs was in tears when he called Jim France and said, “Don’t do this to us!” And it was reported that it was partly his fault because his team’s spending habits were reckless. The France family now knows how angry their lieutenant is. Hey, I didn’t know Hamlin believed I’d spent my entire career scaring NASCAR people until He tweeted this on the eve of the trial,
Nothing says the holiday season like a vicious family fight. An airing of a long-standing family grudge that steps and then resets a line that could not be crossed for a long time. Your uncle finally shared his feelings about your mother’s drinking. Your sister has finally come to terms with the fact that your spouse is harassing her. Your mother-in-law, rising to the occasion, called you a bad parent and then took her point further by saying that you never split the check at family dinners.
So, once that skirmish is over and everyone starts speaking the bitter truth that everyone in the family already knew but no one dared say out loud, the only thing worse than yelling is the awkward silence that follows.
Where do you go from there?
Thursday morning, Jim France stood beside Michael Jordan, surrounded by an endless sea of NASCAR executives, France family members, Hamlin and lawyers. As the dinosaur and the goat stood side by side on the steps of the same courthouse where they recently had a very public family fight, that’s the question looming like a storm cloud over the Daytona 500.
Some will say, as Jordan did after the agreement, that it was never personal, but entirely business. The business model of stock car racing is taking off, and everyone agrees it’s the right plan of action. But hurt feelings don’t heal that quickly, do they?
Few communities in sports are like NASCAR. A relatively small group of people who travel together almost every weekend throughout the year. It really is like a family.
It is not easy for any family to tell its head that he has to hand over the keys of his car. You always hope he realizes he needs to do this first. Jim France did just that on Thursday. Not every key in the chain, but certainly more than he, his father, or his brother had ever left before.
Hopefully, it’s not too late.
