Did You Notice? … The most powerful person in NASCAR these days isn’t reigning champion Kyle Larson?
Or his car owner, Rick Hendrick, the winningest in history, nor the driver-turned-analyst he formerly employed, Dale Earnhardt Jr. It’s not Speedway Motorsports President Marcus Smith, villain-turned-Valentine Denny Hamlin or even the sport’s CEO Jim France.
It’s Michael Jordan.
The six-time NBA champion and arguably best player in basketball history found his calling in another sport some 20+ years after retirement. Holding up the Daytona 500 trophy some two months after bringing NASCAR to heel in a nationally televised trial he settled for millions, his power and popularity have become key to the sport’s resurgence in 2026 and beyond.
One day after his 63rd birthday, Jordan feels as relevant today in sports as when he sank the last shot to end his storybook chapter (and clinch a sixth title) with the Chicago Bulls in 1998. Now entering the sixth year of his NASCAR ownership journey, Jordan’s teams have become a model for how you build a championship contender in an age where building one from scratch seemed impossible.
Past history suggested Jordan wasn’t capable of putting together personnel the same way he made pinpoint passing and shooting seem effortless. For 17 years, he was part of the Charlotte Hornets franchise, majority owner from 2010 through 2023, when he sold his stake in the team for roughly $3 billion.
In the entire time Jordan owned the franchise, it never progressed past the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. The team won more than 45 games only once, during the 2015-16 season, and never finished higher than second in its own division. Only three playoff appearances during that stretch has Jordan’s tenure feeling like the equivalent of Rick Ware Racing in the NASCAR Cup Series.
But Jordan’s competitive fire has never dipped, whether it’s shooting basketball or playing croquet. A NASCAR fan from when he was a kid, he watched races with father James at places like Darlington Raceway and Charlotte Motor Speedway, so becoming a team owner was a lifelong dream, not just a part of a larger portfolio.
Jordan has given 110% into building up the operation behind the scenes with co-owner Hamlin and President Steve Lauletta. And boy, has he delivered. Just look at this simple comparison between his time with the Hornets and 23XI Racing.
| Team | Years | Playoff Appearances | Advanced? | Finals Appearances |
| Charlotte Hornets (NBA) | 17 | 3 | No | 0 |
| 23XI Racing | 5+ | 6 | Yes (4 times) | 1 (2024) |
In just five years, Jordan has a longer list of NASCAR accomplishments: Championship 4 appearance, 10 wins (including the 2025 Brickyard 400), 10 poles and the first African-American driver (Bubba Wallace) to win a Cup race in nearly 60 years. Now, he has the sport’s biggest crown jewel, with Tyler Reddick taking the Daytona 500 in a chaotic finish despite leading only the final lap of the race.
“We hung in there all day,” Jordan said of a race in which three of his four 23XI teams wound up inside the top 10. “Great strategy by the team, and we gave ourselves a chance at the end. Look, I’m ecstatic. I don’t even know what to say. It feels like I won a championship.”
Reddick’s crew chief Billy Scott was elated to make his iconic team owner proud.
“To watch [Jordan] genuinely be excited and the celebration that he has is a lot what drives us,” Scott said. “I think Denny [Hamlin] has always commented that we really celebrate when we get a win … the level of excitement he has is unmatched.”
So is his level of wanting to win. That extends off the racetrack, as Jordan’s push for a fair deal amongst NASCAR team owners resulted in an 18-month fight for a better charter agreement. Jordan and 23XI never backed off, putting the foot on the gas from the start while never wavering in their stance for permanent charters.
He understood the Grand Canyon-like financial gap between selling an NBA team for $3 billion and a team (Furniture Row Racing) selling its charter for just $6 million as recently as the winter of 2018. So he didn’t cave when NASCAR kept fighting, taking the case all the way to court.
And when the trial began? NASCAR learned quickly why no team ever wanted to go up against Jordan. The settlement happened when the score was the equivalent to a 30-point fourth quarter lead, risking the future of the sport getting put in a judge’s hands if NASCAR didn’t turn around and settle the case. Jordan, 23XI and Front Row Motorsports, the key plaintiffs in the lawsuit, wound up getting everything they wanted … for every chartered team.
NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps resigned, almost certainly a casualty of the outcome. Numerous individuals, from France to NASCAR President Steve O’Donnell, came out the worse for wear from a PR perspective as a result of going up against Jordan.
“I think December was a wake-up call,” 23XI co-owner Denny Hamlin said Sunday night (Feb. 15). “I think that the conversations since then have been a lot of self-reflection, in my opinion, from NASCAR about — I think they would have done things differently had they had the opportunity to.
“But we knew that we needed to stick up for what we believed was right. I said all along, I was very confident for the last year because I knew what the facts were. But we have to now figure out how we can get the sport back where it was decades ago.”
As Hamlin and NASCAR look ahead, there’s no better way to build back than putting someone like Jordan front and center, even if he’s sitting on a pit box and not in a car. As the sport hits the 25th anniversary without the loss of perhaps its biggest modern star, Dale Earnhardt Sr., Jordan is one of the few people on earth who could counter with a larger national following and a unique ability to draw new fans into a sport.
“He’s the most popular athlete in the world,” Hamlin said of Jordan. “I don’t think there’s any disputing that.
“He loves the sport, and certainly he goes to a lot of races. Sometimes, you don’t even see him and he’s there. He makes more races than people know.”
The question is now, what does Jordan actually want with this power? Does he just want to keep winning? Or does he have concrete marketing and competition ideas on how to improve the sport? That’s the biggest difference, in 2026, between where Jordan stands now and where Earnhardt was at the peak of his NASCAR power.
Earnhardt was, in many ways, flexing his muscles by reacting to NASCAR decisions he disagreed with. He was one of the only people who could get through to Bill France Jr. and get him to alter a rule or schedule decision the family made. Now? There seems to be a leadership void post-Phelps we’re looking for someone to fill. The NASCAR leader who comes up with the right ideas to elevate the sport is the man or woman who can fill this gap.
To what extent Jordan chooses to do so, at age 63, is up to him. But he’s two decades younger than some of the key NASCAR ownership (Roger Penske, Joe Gibbs) and could be in position to become Toyota’s top organization when Hamlin retires from Joe Gibbs Racing. The opportunity to transform a sport is directly in front of him; all Jordan has to do is take it.
In closing, it’s notable to look back to what Bob Costas said about Jordan shortly after he won his sixth and final NBA title in 1998.
“He’s authentic,” Costas said, “His essence is so much deeper than image. Image, is, in his case, an amplification of something true and substantive.
“His heart and his athletic integrity is every bit as impressive as his artistry.”
Jordan broke through to NBA fans because he was so genuine. That level of honesty, after decades of not feeling heard, is what fans and other major players inside NASCAR are looking for right now, an added superpower not easily achieved in an era of polarization.
We know Jordan can deliver that within 23XI. How he delivers that to the sport as a whole will be one of the most fascinating stories of 2026.
Follow Tom Bowles on X at @NASCARBowles
The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 50+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.
I think you are over reacting to the situation. Roger penske is probably the most person with alot of power in nascar bc of the tracks he currently has that nascar races at. No owner has any tracks much less a highly successful race team that penske owns. Just my opinion.