There is a juicy bit of irony to the historic antitrust lawsuit brought against NASCAR last week by the unlikely combination of 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports.
NASCAR probably wanted to avoid a postseason full of headlines about the lack of a new charter agreement between it and the NASCAR Cup Series’ 13 full-time race teams.
After two years of back and forth of negotiations, NASCAR put its foot down in early September, according to the lawsuit.
“With little warning, NASCAR sent a final, take-it-or-leave-it version of the 2025 Charter Agreement to the teams at approximately 5:00 p.m. on September 6, 2024, and told the teams they had a 6:00 p.m. deadline to sign the more than 100-page agreement or risk not having a charter for 2025,” it read.
“Outrage” from the teams resulted in NASCAR extending that deadline to midnight.
Look, I like to read. I had a college-level reading level in junior high.
But there’s no way on God’s green Earth I would be able to — or I would force someone — to read an over 100-page important legal document adequately in six hours, let alone one.
Especially since I’m not a lawyer.
Then all but two teams signed it.
Rick Hendrick signed it because he was “tired” of the negotiation process.
To NASCAR, that was probably the point. To beat the teams into submission.
The lawsuit cited media reports about owner reactions to the deal.
“One team described its signing as ‘coerced,’ and another said it was ‘under duress,'” the suit continued. “A third team said, NASCAR ‘put a gun to our head[s]’ and we ‘had to sign.’ A fourth described NASCAR’s tactics as that of a ‘communist regime.'”
(Sidebar: One of my favorite parts of this whole lawsuit is guessing which owner said the “communist regime” line.)
Whether it was a combination of hardball tactics and the quality of the deal NASCAR presented, the lawsuit came down the pipe.
In it came words I wouldn’t have been able to use in a sentence in junior high or now, like “monopsonistic” and other forms of the word “monopoly.”
There’s a lot packed into the lawsuit’s 46 pages alleging the unfair practices of NASCAR and the France family.
And it’s not going to end anytime soon. It might not dominate the conversation each week, but it will always be lingering in the background.
Especially during Championship Week.
That’s five days before the season-ending race at Phoenix Raceway.
What happens between those two dates? One would expect President Steve Phelps, and not Chairman Jim France, to give the annual State of the Sport address to media members.
And won’t that be a fun time?
Phelps likely won’t even say anything of real note about the lawsuit due to pending litigation. But that won’t stop the questions from being asked and the stories and headlines that come with the answers.
And if NASCAR hadn’t treated its last charter agreement proposal like a 100-page pop quiz, it maybe could have avoided all of them.
But it did exactly that.
Whether this lawsuit gets to the point where discovery occurs, and each side’s dirty financial secrets get broadcast in court filings, I have my doubts. Because I don’t think any organization that could be described as monopsonistic would want that to happen.
So I’m crossing my fingers that it does.
Daniel McFadin is a 10-year veteran of the NASCAR media corp. He wrote for NBC Sports from 2015 to October 2020. He currently works full time for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and is lead reporter and an editor for Frontstretch. He is also host of the NASCAR podcast "Dropping the Hammer with Daniel McFadin" presented by Democrat-Gazette.
You can email him at danielmcfadin@gmail.com.