In the middle of the courtroom on Monday was a bloody, dead horse carcass, which had been repeatedly beaten throughout the opening five days of the antitrust trial, which has pitted NASCAR Cup Series teams 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports against NASCAR.
Despite how mutilated the horse’s corpse already was, it didn’t keep NASCAR attorney Lawrence Buterman from taking many more swings at it with his bloody stick on day 6 of what has become affectionately known as “NASCOURT”.
Prior to his cross-examination by Buterman, Professor Edward A. Snyder, an economist, delivered his expert testimony, in which Snyder concluded that NASCAR had, in his opinion, used anti-competitive actions to further strengthen NASCAR’s monopolistic hold on premier stock car racing in the United States.
Snyder concluded after seeing that NASCAR took three distinct anti-competitive actions in the years leading up to the 2025 Charter negotiations.
In the original 2016 Charter Agreement, NASCAR instituted exclusivity deals with the race tracks that host NASCAR Cup Series events, whether the track is owned by NASCAR or not. The sanctioning body also instituted exclusivity deals with its race teams, which forbid the teams from competing in opposing series, unless receiving express written consent from NASCAR.
And in 2022, NASCAR installed the Next Gen race car, which came with intellectual property protections that allowed NASCAR to stifle its use in any other series or exhibition event that it didn’t want to allow the car to compete in.
As a result, any potential entrant in the premier stock car racing marketplace would now be without a legitimate group of tracks to run on, and they would be hamstrung to not utilizing current NASCAR team owners or the cars that they own.
According to the economist expert, who served as the dean of three different business schools, the race teams suffered harm from NASCAR’s anti-competitive actions, which included loss of profits, reduction in the overall market value of the teams, and additional lost revenues.
In order to come up with the formula to determine the losses, Snyder used the most comparable fair market that he had at his disposal, Formula 1, to create a “but for” world, where NASCAR, in theory, didn’t participate in anti-competitive actions.
After his equations were put in, Snyder calculated the losses for Front Row Motorsports from 2021 to 2024 to be $215.8 million, while Front Row Motorsports allegedly suffered from losses of $148.9 million.
Snyder contends that had it not been for NASCAR locking up the tracks, teams, and cars, a viable breakaway series could have formed by 2021.
When pressed on the hypothetical of a breakaway series forming, Buterman asked how Snyder could be so confident that another entry would form in the world of stock car racing by 2021. Snyder referenced internal NASCAR documents where executives expressed concern over the potential formation of a rival league.
Buterman asked Snyder how he concluded a rival series would form to NASCAR by 2021 if #NASCAR hadn’t engaged in anti-competitive actions (exclusivity deals with tracks, teams and car), to which Snyder said that proof is in NASCAR’s documents as execs were expressing concern over…
— Toby Christie (@Toby_Christie) December 8, 2025
And Snyder pointed to the fact that all of the anti-competitive actions discussed in the communications to combat a potential rival league were enacted by the sanctioning body.
Snyder hypothesized that if a rival league were forming, NASCAR would have likely spent an additional $1.06 billion from 2021 to 2024 on distributing additional revenue to teams in order to keep them, similar to the PGA Tour increasing purses to keep golfers after LIV Golf was debuted.
As for another expert, who will serve as a witness for NASCAR later in the trial, who said NASCAR would become insolvent if it were forced to pay the damages calculated by Snyder, Snyder refuted that claim.
“NASCAR is in the business to make adjustments,” Snyder explained.
Snyder continued to lay out that NASCAR has $2.2 billion in assets, including the plethora of race tracks across the country. Additionally, the sanctioning body has a high credit rating, which would allow it to easily borrow money and would be able to attract outside investors if need be.
But Snyder explained it likely wouldn’t be necessary with NASCAR’s high level of sponsorship revenue, which leads to roughly $251 million in profits each year. Snyder said the sanctioning body could also shed the $130 million it pays each year to non-NASCAR tracks for exclusivity.
Snyder also jabbed that the France family has paid out roughly $400 million to its family trust from NASCAR revenue from 2021 to 2024.
In other words, there is a lot of money to scrape from in the business of NASCAR.
Incredibly, Buterman made a retort that I’m not sure landed like he thought it would.
He quizzed Snyder on why, in this hypothetical world, where anti-competitive actions have been stripped away, NASCAR would agree to pay teams $1.06 billion more over a four-year period, when they have them under contract? Buterman continued, “They can’t go anywhere.”
To which Snyder essentially emphasized that to be the whole point of the exercise.
Buterman calmed and rephrased his question to ask why, without a guarantee that the teams would remain committed to running only NASCAR, would NASCAR agree to increase payments to teams in the hypothetical “but for” world?
Snyder explained that if NASCAR paid a fair market value to teams in revenue, they wouldn’t have to worry about teams leaving to join a competitive series that formed.
It was at this point that the line of questioning became very mundane and repetitive, and it forced Judge Bell to tell Buterman to move on, as he had asked the same question multiple times, and that he had the answer he was going to get.
As the clock reached 5:00 PM ET, Judge Bell asked if Buterman was nearly finished with his cross-examination of Snyder, to which Buterman indicated he still had quite some time left. Judge Bell cut the day right there and asked the jury if they would be able to attend court beginning at 8:30 AM ET on Tuesday and stay until 5:30 PM ET. The jury agreed to do so, as over the next four days, it would give the court an additional four hours in an effort to try to breeze through the long list of witnesses remaining in the case.
Snyder will conclude his cross-examination on Tuesday morning. Hopefully, for the horse and everyone else’s sake, the bloody stick stays at home.
The Plaintiffs (23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports) have four witnesses remaining, and they include an accountant, NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps, NASCAR CEO Jim France, and Richard Childress.
The defendants (NASCAR) have 16 names remaining on their witness list, and among them will be Curtis Polk, a co-owner of 23XI Racing.
