When ranking people you likely don’t want to make mad in the NASCAR world, Richard Childress has to be near the top of the list. The former driver turned legendary NASCAR Cup Series team owner has had a knack for speaking his mind and for using his fists if needed over the years.
Tuesday, Childress was among the witnesses who took the stand for their testimony in the ongoing antitrust trial that has pitted race teams 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports against NASCAR.
Childress delivered an impactful testimony, which ultimately furthered the case for the plaintiffs, but it was part of his cross-examination that ended up being the talk of the town.
While seeking to impeach Childress, who said that team ownership in the NASCAR Cup Series wasn’t profitable, NASCAR attorney Christopher Yates began to recite from a document that had not been made available in discovery. Additionally, Childress claimed the document is protected under a non-disclosure agreement.
After Childress claimed team ownership wasn’t a profitable business venture with the state of the 2025 Charter Agreement, Yates asked Childress, “Who is Bobby Hillin Jr.?”
Childress responded, “A racer.”
Yates responded, “And a pretty good businessman, correct?”
To which Childress said he wasn’t sure how good of a businessman Hillin was, but yes.
This laid the foundation for Yates to reveal that Childress, who it was also revealed holds a 60% stake of ownership in Richard Childress Racing (Chartwell Investments owns the other 40%), was in talks with an investment group led by Hillin to sell a portion of the ownership of Richard Childress Racing.
Childress says Chartwell has been looking to get out of its ownership role in the team for 4-to-5 years, and that Childress is also open to selling a portion of his stake.
In the end, Childress said he terminated the talks as Hillin’s group was too “pie in the sky,” but he questioned how Yates obtained the document, as it was protected with an NDA. This was a question that the plaintiff’s attorneys asked at the end of the day’s proceedings, to which Judge Kenneth Bell agreed that the admission of evidence that had not been offered into discovery and that had been held under an NDA, and was used to reference the finances of Childress’ non-Cup Series financials, was improper.
Judge Bell instructed both sides to come up with a resolution to the situation or the court would step in.
Aside from the interesting exchange about Hillin, Childress testified about his thoughts during the 2025 Charter agreement negotiations, and his recollection of events mirrored that of Heather Gibbs, a co-owner of Joe Gibbs Racing, who testified last week.
Childress said he felt that he had no other option but to sign the agreement, which was sent to him at 5:00 PM ET on September 6, 2024, with a call from Steve Phelps telling him to sign or he’d lose his Charter.
Childress explained to the court that if he had the financial means to race without his charter, he would have chosen not to sign the agreement. However, Childress says RCR is a blue-collar team that does what it has to do.
Yates began his cross-examination by showing an email from Richard Childress to Jim France, where Childress outlined the four pillars that he felt RCR needed to be addressed with the 2025 Charter agreement.
As Yates read the opening portion of the statement, where Childress states that Charters have been a good thing for teams, he attempted to move on, but Childress, who is emphatic that he wrote the email himself wouldn’t let Yates press on without allowing him to read the rest of the email, where Childress explained to France that the biggest item for him was the permanency of Charters, as he feels that would drive equity value in the teams.
Childress, who is an owner of the Carolina Cowboys team in PBR, explained that the PBR has permanent franchises, and the teams have seen exponential growth in equity. He says that while NASCAR teams didn’t pay for their Charters in 2016 that he and other owners offered to the France family to purchase the Charters in order to become equity partners in NASCAR, as is customary in other sports.
The France family, Childress claims, turned that offer down and awarded Charters cost-free in 2016. However, Childress claims he and other owners “Paid their life” for their Charters.
When pressed by Yates on whether the Charter system has driven long-term equity to race teams, Childress admitted it had. He said prior to the Charter agreement, teams were worth pennies on the dollar. However, Childress continued to contend that permanent Charters would further drive equity value higher for teams, which echoed the expert testimony from earlier in the day by Professor Edward A. Snyder.
For the most part, Childress was composed on the stand, and even shared a bit of emotion with the jury as he told the story about how he went from selling peanuts and popcorn at Bowman Gray Stadium as a youth to starting his own driving career with the purchase of a $20 1947 Plymouth.
Childress got choked up when talking about the death of his friend, and longtime driver Dale Earnhardt. The open set the tone for the rest of Childress’ testimony, which again furthered the narrative delivered by Heather Gibbs last week that the teams signed the Charter Agreement, but did so because they felt they were left without an option. They had to either sign it, or lose their Charters. And unlike Michael Jordan, they didn’t feel they were equipped to fight the legal fight against NASCAR.
NASCAR’s primary argument is that only the two teams suing them were unhappy about the 2025 Charter agreement, and that the other 13 teams willingly signed. Now, it seems that some of those teams, including Richard Childress Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing, weren’t as willing as previously described.
Jim France Admits He Has Never Supported Permanent Charters
NASCAR Chairman Jim France took the stand at the end of Tuesday, and he was grilled by Jeffrey Kessler. However, for the most part, France used the “I don’t know” or “I don’t recall” answer for a bulk of the questions posed to him.
France, who revealed his compensation as NASCAR’s Chairman is $3.5 million per year, was asked if Lesa France Kennedy is also an employee of NASCAR. France responded that he believed she was, but when asked about her job title and compensation, he indicated that he didn’t know.
While France didn’t agree with how Kessler posed the question, he did agree that it was he who said no to permanent charters to the teams. And France indicated that his stance on permanent or “evergreen” charters never changed throughout the negotiation process for the 2025 Charter agreement, which spanned more than two years.
A big point of NASCAR’s defense has been that the bulk of NASCAR team owners had additional revenue as their main point of negotiation in the Charter talks, but Kessler showed France personal emails from Rick Hendrick, Joe Gibbs, Roger Penske, and Jack Roush, in which all four team owners separately indicated that permanent Charters were their top ask in the negotiations as they felt they were imperative for the stabilization of the business model of team ownership.
France acknowledged the emails, but again, didn’t waver in his disdain for permanent Charters.
Another odd moment of France’s testimony came when he was asked about Steve O’Donnell’s internal NASCAR emails that state he was watching France read Heather Gibbs’ letter requesting permanent Charters aloud, and that France was “swearing every other sentence.” O’Donnell later testified that France wasn’t swearing, but that it was a figure of speech to indicate France was angry while reading the letter.
France said he didn’t recall this, which led Kessler to read the entire letter back to France, and paragraph by paragraph, he asked France if this was something that would anger him, to which France would say, “No.”
This led Kessler to ask if O’Donnell was lying in the email and his testimony, to which France said he wasn’t testifying that O’Donnell was lying, he just didn’t recall being angry, and that he doesn’t feel like reading the letter aloud is something he would have done.
