A few years ago I was in the garage at Darlington Speedway chatting with David Pearson, Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough. All three are among the greatest racers in the world. NASCAR story. All three are long retired from racing, but all three only recently gave up trying to become Cup Series team owners because the experience crippled them all financially.
Yaboro told me, “You're looking at three NASCAR dinosaurs.”
Pearson laughed and replied, “But we're doing better than the dinosaurs because we're still here.”
When I asked them what they discovered that dinosaurs didn't, Allison explained, “We were smart enough to realize we were dinosaurs and got out of the damn road before we went extinct.”
Another NASCAR dinosaur was removed from the road Thursday afternoon at the Charlotte Courthouse.
An antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR brought by 23XI Racing, which is co-owned by Michael Jordan and three-time Daytona 500 winner. Denny Hamlinand Front Row Motorsports (FRM) began to push forward towards the end of the second week, both sides announced that they reached an agreement.
As the finer details of the agreement were still being revealed later in the evening, there was no doubt that the victory belonged to the teams over the sanctioning body, as we already knew that their ultimate goal had been achieved. After all, it was about their fight for NASCAR to make the team's charters, which are as close to stick-and-ball franchise race cars as possible, permanent – or, as their lawyer Jeffrey Kessler described it, “evergreen” – as opposed to the contract-to-contract model renewed by NASCAR's massive media rights deals.
It's hard to find anyone in the Cup Series paddock who doesn't believe this is the right move. In fact, every team in the Cup Series garage was at one time 23XI and FRM, although they eventually relented and were willing to let the two teams continue to fight on their own. They won that battle, and as a result, every NASCAR team owner lucky enough to own one of those 36 charters won. Nobody calls it a franchise, but that's essentially what it is now, in keeping with the business model of almost every other major league sport, such as Jordan's longtime home, the Stadium NBA.
NASCAR lost this fight. As the trial continued, defeat began to look inevitable for the same reason that Jordan and his team considered the last charter agreement, which they refused to sign in September 2024, to be unsatisfactory. A reason that everyone in that garage, including the commissioner and president of NASCAR, had already talked about behind closed doors – and in emails and texts that were revealed during and during the trial – but no one spoke about it publicly until the trial forced them to do so.
The door to the future was blocked by a dinosaur.
Jim France is a good man, a brilliant businessman, and a man who loves auto racing on a level that few can understand. But he also never wanted to take the position he now holds as NASCAR CEO and chairman. His father, Bill France, took over the position after overseeing NASCAR's founding meetings in 1948. His older brother, Bill France Jr., took over those duties from his father in the early 1970s and ruled the sport for three decades with a highly respected iron fist. He was succeeded by his son Brian, whose tenure at the helm was turbulent at best and ended prematurely in 2018.
Despite all this, legendary introvert Jim France was happy to stay in the background, racing sports cars and working in the racetrack ownership department while enjoying great influence in the NASCAR boardroom without any of the public attention that his father and brother loved and his nephew hated.
But when Brian France retired and NASCAR's management flowchart was unexpectedly rejected, it went straight across Jim France's desk, whether he wanted it or not. The “Steves,” NASCAR Commissioner Phelps and President O'Donnell, were the faces of that leadership, a constant presence in the paddock as they met with the media and their teams. But both always politely reminded that whatever decisions they made or contemplated, it all came first through family, namely Jim, niece Lesa France Kennedy and her son Ben.
This became clear to everyone in the sport when it came to the introduction of charters in 2016, a concept created in conjunction with team owners to help meet their financial needs. It became even clearer that everything was going through France when the final tug-of-war over the charter agreement took place two years before the current agreement was concluded.
NASCAR's most powerful team owners personally pleaded with France to negotiate a better charter deal, the court heard. When asked about the meetings this week, France said he considered them all great friends but was unmoved by their calls.
As also revealed in court, the people who worked for France were frustrated by their repeated attempts to get him to greenlight compromises they had reached with those owners, but were rebuffed by the man they apparently referred to in text messages such as “1996… dictatorship”, although they refused to identify it as France during their time in court.
At some point during all of this, Jim France finally realized that no, this wasn't 1996, when his brother was picking up speed and approaching an unprecedented decade of growth. And it's not 1966, when his father built and assembled a portfolio of speedways that are still the foundation of NASCAR and the French family fortune. It's not even 2016 when charters appeared.
Instead, we're looking to 2026. Today's world is an open book. No secrets. No one knows this better than NASCAR and its racing teams, whose 77 years of doing business with closed doors and closed books were exposed during this ordeal. For the first time, we now know how much teams and their drivers make—and lose—and we know how much money flows through the sanctioning body's Daytona headquarters and into the France family's bank accounts.
And when it comes to collateral damage, racing fans are rightfully outraged that NASCAR commissioner called Richard Childress, who teamed with Dale Earnhardt to win six Cup titles, a “dumb redneck.” We now know that Joe Gibbs, the three-time Super Bowl-winning coach and five-time Cup winner, was moved to tears when he called Jim France and said, “Don't do this to us!” and he was told that it was his fault in part because his team spent money recklessly. The France family now knows how unhappy their assistants were. Damn, I didn't know Hamlin thought I'd been scared of NASCAR people my whole career until he tweeted this on the eve of the trial.
Nothing heralds the holiday season like a violent family fight. The release of long-simmering family resentment that crosses, and then re-crosses, a line long thought insurmountable. Your uncle finally spoke his mind about your mom's drinking. Your sister has finally realized that your husband scares her. Your mother-in-law, taken by surprise, called you a bad parent and then added that you never split the check at family dinners.
So, once this confrontation is over and everyone stops shouting the harsh truth that everyone in the family already knew but no one dared to say out loud, the only thing worse than the screaming is the awkward silence that follows.
Where do you go from there?
On Thursday morning, Jim France stood next to Michael Jordan, surrounded by NASCAR executives, members of the France family, Hamlin and an endless sea of ​​lawyers. As the dinosaur and the GOAT stood shoulder to shoulder on the steps of the same courthouse where they had just gotten into a public family brawl, that was the question that hovered over the scene like a storm cloud over the Daytona 500.
Some will say, as Jordan did after the settlement, that this was never a personal matter, but strictly business. The stock car racing business model is moving forward, and everyone seems to agree that this is the right course of action. But hurt feelings never heal that quickly, do they?
Few sports communities can match NASCAR. A relatively small group of people who travel together every weekend almost all year round. It really feels like a family.
It's never easy for any family to tell the patriarch that he needs to hand over the car keys. You always hope that he will understand that he needs to do it first. On Thursday, Jim France did just that. Not every key on the chain, but certainly more than he, his father or his brother had ever given away before.
I hope it wasn't too late.
