We officially slipped into uncharted territory on Monday as the highly anticipated antitrust lawsuit pitting 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports against the NASCAR sanctioning body and the France family is underway.
RELATED: Live Updates From NASCAR, 23XI, FRM Antitrust Lawsuit
In a trial that is expected to be 10-12 days long, the opening day was every bit of a full day inside the Charles R. Jonas Federal Building in uptown Charlotte, NC. At the end of the opening day, the nine-person jury (six jurors and three alternates) was officially selected, and both sides were able to present lengthy opening statements.
And at the end of the day, Denny Hamlin was called to the stand as the first witness to give testimony in the trial.
In the opening moments of Hamlin’s testimony, which concluded near 5 PM ET and will resume when the court’s recess is lifted at 9 AM ET on Tuesday, the 60-time NASCAR Cup Series race-winning driver showed a lot of emotion when the topic of how he became a NASCAR Cup Series driver came up.
As Hamlin relived his expedited trip through the lower levels of racing on his path to NASCAR’s top series, he was overcome with emotion when thinking about his father, who has undergone struggles with his health recently.
After a few moments, Hamlin was able to compose himself and finish out the early portion of his testimony, where he more or less explained who he was to the jury, and kind of hit on the ins and outs of the sport of NASCAR and how the Charter System works for NASCAR team owners.
While the only evidence that has been shown in court so far is the three Charter sale agreements, where 23XI Racing purchased Charters from Germain Racing in 2020, StarCom Racing in 2021, and Stewart-Haas Racing in 2024, Hamlin did take a few jabs at the defendants as far as sponsorship is involved.
Hamlin explained that NASCAR’s taking Germain Racing’s sponsor (GEICO) led to that team folding, which is how 23XI Racing was able to open its doors in the first place. Hamlin would also explain that when a sponsor comes to 23XI Racing wanting to join the sport, he has to fend off NASCAR itself, which he says is actively trying to secure the sponsor deals that the teams are also trying to land for their race cars.
An additional nugget that Hamlin revealed in the first portion of his testimony on Monday is that 23XI Racing pays an $8 million annual fee to Joe Gibbs Racing for the technical alliance supporting its three-car NASCAR Cup Series team. While the fee sounds hefty, Hamlin explained that the alliance allows his team to run lean staff-wise. 23XI Racing employs 140 people, while many of the juggernaut teams in the sport have 300, 400, 500, or more employees.
With Joe Gibbs Racing installing the bodies on 23XI Racing’s cars, sharing integral data, it frees up some of the stress on 23XI Racing to hire people to fill those roles within its organization.
While 23XI Racing has turned a profit in each season, aside from 2024, since entering the NASCAR Cup Series, Hamlin says the catalyst for the profitability of the team is that Michael Jordan is a co-owner of the team, and that companies want to sponsor the team solely to be aligned with Jordan’s brand. Hamlin admits other teams, such as Front Row Motorsports, aren’t as fortunate, and it’s why the bulk of the teams have allegedly not turned a profit in some time.
While part one of Hamlin’s testimony ended the opening day of the trial, the day started with jury selection. In the end, nine people, six men and three women, made the cut. Six will serve as jurors for the trial, while the other three will serve as alternates if needed.
Initially, the attorneys for both sides had selected a group of five male and four female jurors, but one of the female jurors had a parenting conflict, which led to her being dismissed from the group. To fill the jury pool to a total of nine people, the court contacted another juror who had not been eliminated by the plaintiffs or defendants.
After the jury was sworn in, Jeffrey Kessler, representing 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports, and John E. Stephenson, Jr., representing NASCAR, delivered their opening statements, which laid out to the jury the path that they felt the trial would follow.
Kessler explained that NASCAR being a monopoly is not a question, as Judge Kenneth Bell had already ruled that NASCAR is operating as a monopoly. However, Kessler says two questions remain:
- Did NASCAR maintain its monopoly by utilizing anticompetitive conduct?
- If so, did NASCAR hurt the teams by offering them too little in the original 2016 Charter Agreement?
Obviously, Kessler feels the evidence in the case will be overwhelming to support that the answer to both questions is a resounding yes.
Stephenson followed up Kessler by asking, if the Charter Agreement is so anticompetitive, why have 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports repeatedly been involved in purchasing more charters? And why was one of the main sticking points in the two-plus-year charter negotiations that teams wanted permanent Charters? If the system is so anticompetitive, wouldn’t the teams want to do away with it?
It’s a great question, but it is important to remember that while the team owners bargained for a better operating system, which turned into the Charter System, heading into the 2016 season, even if it was better than what they had before, it still doesn’t mean that it was a fair agreement for the teams.
That will be up to the jury to decide over the next couple of weeks.
NASCAR also states that none of the anticompetitive claims being brought forth in court during this trial had been voiced by any of the teams in the lead-up to the legal action that was taken by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports.
Stephenson also alleges that from the start of the Charter negotiations in 2022, Curtis Polk, one of the 23XI Racing co-owners, had planned to sue NASCAR all along to gain leverage in the negotiations.
NASCAR’s lead attorney asked, “Why are we here?”
According to NASCAR, it’s because of Polk.
Overall, it was an interesting opening day of the 23XI Racing/Front Row Motorsports antitrust trial against NASCAR. And the trial is expected to continue to pick up steam as further testimony takes place and additional pieces of evidence are shown to the jury.
