Earlier this year, I wrote a piece that covered what I thought would happen to the sport of American stock car auto racing if 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports were to win the federal antitrust lawsuit they levied against NASCAR in the fall of 2024.
As that case has progressed, more and more aspects of each side’s points of view have leaked out to the public, and in the most recent preliminary injunction hearing, the teams revealed a bombshell discovery.
Likely hidden in a stack of papers acquired from NASCAR in discovery, the teams unearthed a document that shows the series’ leadership expressing the desire to grow in a number of different ways.
Let’s go through this half-page document line-by-line to see what the France family and NASCAR’s vision of the future looks like.
According to the document, Speedway Motorsports Incorporated — an independent company that owns multiple tracks on the NASCAR calendar — appears to be suffering from financial issues that have put the multi-billion dollar company in significant debt.
As many of you readers may already know, NASCAR owns a number of racing facilities as well, including tracks like Daytona, Darlington, Watkins Glen, Kansas, Talladega, Chicagoland, Homestead, Richmond, Martinsville, Michigan, and Phoenix, among others that host other racing series.
NASCAR’s solution to SMI’s debt problems seems to be to acquire the company and own nearly every permanent race course on their schedule, allowing them to unilaterally make sweeping decisions on race tracks and their ultimate fates when it comes to hosting NASCAR races.
It doesn’t stop there, though.
NASCAR and the France family want to ensure that NASCAR is the only oval racing series in the United States, which is why they wanted to continue levying sanctions on other racing series — like the NTT IndyCar Series.
These sanctions prohibit any other racing series from racing on those tracks that could be perceived as a threat to NASCAR.
For those unaware, these sanctions have already been put in place for IndyCar, which is why the premier American open-wheel racing series is unable to race on some of the best ovals the country has to offer.
NASCAR and SMI have already been in cahoots on these sanctions against IndyCar and any other fledgling stock car oval racing series to prevent any competition.
If NASCAR were to own SMI, they could essentially prevent IndyCar and anyone else from racing on any of their tracks, which does nothing to advance auto racing growth in America.
On top of that, NASCAR and the France family seek to directly compensate drivers in some form or fashion, which they were able to execute this season with the Driver Ambassador Program.
The DAP allows drivers to receive compensation from the sport’s sanctioning body for making more appearances on television shows, podcasts, and events to help promote the sport and its brand.
This seems like a good way to entice the drivers to be a bit more public and in the spotlight more often, and on the surface, it doesn’t seem like it would cause any long-term issues.
That is until you read about the bit titled “Vertical Integration”.
NASCAR and the France family acknowledge that this vague term is likely to shake the boat amongst their sponsorship partners as well as the fanbase as a whole “upfront”.
The document includes the bullet point, “Would likely require significant paychecks to drivers to get them to leave.” What is NASCAR getting the drivers to leave from?
NASCAR and the France family intend to eventually abolish the idea of team ownership entirely. This sounds like an extreme claim, but I encourage you to read the words on the document to yourself a few times.
This is further cemented by the next line where NASCAR and the France family notice that this would be quite the undertaking, noting that it would be, “a huge operational shift to prep 36 cars per week.”
If you’ve been keeping up, NASCAR and the France family find themselves in a federal antitrust case to determine if they are operating a monopoly over American stock car racing.
Everything in this singular document shows that they have every intent on expanding and strengthening the current stranglehold they have on American motorsports, and frankly, there’s no other way to look at this.
If NASCAR and the France family continue down the road that they want to travel down, here’s how the sport will look in a matter of years.
Here, There, and Everywhere
If the sanctioning body was able to facilitate a purchase of Speedway Motorsports, that would give NASCAR and the France family dominion over the following tracks in addition to the ones listed earlier:
EchoPark Speedway (Atlanta), Bristol, Dover, Kentucky Speedway (defunct), Las Vegas, Nashville Superspeedway, New Hampshire, North Wilkesboro, Sonoma, and Texas.
The potential transaction would give NASCAR ownership over 30 racing facilities across the United States, handing them an effective gridlock over oval racing in America.
Considering how the France family handled the repave at Iowa and the closing of Auto Club, the SMI acquisition offers up the potential of NASCAR not being able to treat all 30 of their facilities with the adequate care that they need at the appropriate time due to the debt they’ll acquire from SMI.
Another ramification of this acquisition could lead to Penske Entertainment selling the NTT IndyCar Series and Indianapolis Motor Speedway as NASCAR would own all but three (Indianapolis, Gateway, and Milwaukee) of the major oval tracks in America that they currently host races.
One could make the argument that NASCAR is loosening up the sanctions on IndyCar that they propose in this document as NASCAR-owned Phoenix Raceway is rumored to be included on the 2026 NTT IndyCar Series schedule, but they could be generating more revenue to further exclude them in the future.
While this potential merger would remove the need for the NASCAR schedule to allocate a certain number of dates on their calendar to SMI tracks, it opens up the possibility of multiple tracks going the way of Auto Club Speedway, especially tracks like Dover and Iowa that continue to lose opportunities to host races.
The future NASCAR calendar would look a lot different, but it must be said: at what cost?
Team Ownership? A Thing of the Past!
On top of that, NASCAR’s animus with team ownership would reach a boiling point that triggers the France family into bribing the drivers away from their teams to take total control of the series, top to bottom.
NASCAR would own all of the Cup Series cars, drivers, crew, and teams. Much of the fabric of the series would be lost as teams like Wood Brothers, Hendrick Motorsports, and Legacy Motor Club close their doors after the sanctioning body exclude them.
This is a far cry from 1971 where legendary driver and team owner Junior Johnson convinced RJ Reynolds to purchase the title rights to the Cup Series and save the sport as we knew it from financial ruin.
If it wasn’t for Junior Johnson, NASCAR likely doesn’t survive the oil crisis of the 1970s, meaning Johnson’s driver Cale Yarborough doesn’t get into a fight in the Daytona infield with the Allison Brothers in 1979 to shoot the sport of stock car racing into the broader American consciousness.
Rather than recognizing that teams bring character and value to the sport, NASCAR wants to make sure that everything is done in-house and under their thumb, so they’re willing to pay off the drivers and crew to get them to abandon the team owners that likely took a shot on them and helped build their careers.
This does bring up a question: What does this do to the Trucks and Xfinity Series?
Xfinity and Trucks Also Move to Spec
Based on Denny Hamlin’s most recent podcast remarks, it appears NASCAR might want both ladder series to move to single-source suppliers in the next few years:
“From what I’m hearing, in the Truck Series, NASCAR’s telling them — this is what I’ve been told, this is a rumor; I don’t know if this is factual, but it’s a rumor — that they need them to go to spec trucks by 2028. It’s going to happen in the Xfinity Series as well. Those guys are running cars that are old, old, old, old, old, old.”
After the Cup Series, it looks like NASCAR wants to bring the rest of the owners across the three national series to their knees, so they can control every aspect of the sport.
And, I mean every aspect.
NASCAR Productions currently produces every Xfinity Series race in conjunction with the CW, so when the sport is up for its next media rights contract, I imagine they intend to build out their staff over the next seven years to produce all of their own races after 2031, from Trucks all the way up to Cup.
By 2035, I wouldn’t be surprised if the France family put up a bid for (or outright owned) every major racing series and every major oval racing facility in America based on the plan that’s laid out here.
This is what 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports are fighting to prevent.
NASCAR already holds a monopoly over American stock car auto racing, and they want to rapidly expand it over the next decade. If the rule of law doesn’t stop them now, I am unsure what will.
(Top Photo Credit: Getty Images)
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