CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Front Row Motorsports owner Bob Jenkins was back on the stand Thursday to testify in the fourth day of the explosive antitrust case that accuses NASCAR of being a monopolistic tyrant in violation of federal antitrust laws.
Jenkins began his testimony Wednesday, and the fast-food franchiser said he was an avid NASCAR fan who fulfilled a longtime dream when he was finally able to own a car in America’s top motorsports series.
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But he said he has lost $100 million since becoming a team owner in the early 2000s, even with a Daytona 500 victory in 2001. His love of the sport and belief that it can be profitable have kept him going, but what he believes is a winless revenue model has led Front Row to join 23XI Racing in a federal lawsuit against NASCAR.
23XI is owned by Basketball Hall of Famer Michael Jordan and three-time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin. Jordan has the funding to fight NASCAR and Jenkins joined the battle when he was offended by NASCAR’s “take it or leave it” offer on charter deals.
A charter is the equivalent of the franchise model used by other sports leagues, but in NASCAR it guarantees a team a spot in the field for all 38 races plus a set percentage of revenue. Front Row was one of the teams that received two free charters when NASCAR created the system in 2016 and Jenkins thought then the deals were bad — but a step in the right direction.
The 15 Sprint Cup organizations fought for more than two years to get better terms for the charter extensions that began this year. But when NASCAR’s final offer came at 6 p.m. on a Friday last year, with six hours to sign the 112-page document, Jenkins hesitated because it was going “virtually backwards in many ways.”
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“It was insulting, it went so far backwards,” he testified Wednesday. “NASCAR wanted to rule governance with an iron fist, it was like taxation without representation. NASCAR has the right to do what it wants.”
He said he was “honestly very hurt” by the sequence of events and thought NASCAR “knew we had to sign him blind. Some of these owners have $500-600 million facilities, long-term sponsors. They couldn’t get away with it.”
Jenkins testified that Joe Gibbs personally apologized to Jenkins for signing the agreement, and that most of the owners signed the agreement reluctantly.
“Not a single owner said, ‘I was happy to sign him.’ Not a single one,” he testified. “100% of owners think the charter system is good,” Jenkins said. “The charter agreement is not.”
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Front Row and 23XI were the only two organizations out of 15 to refuse to sign and turn to court in a lawsuit that could completely rework NASCAR’s framework.
The extensions ended more than two years of tough negotiations during which neither NASCAR nor the teams budged.
Team losses
NASCAR executive vice president for strategy Scott Prime said Wednesday that a study he worked on as a consultant found that the sport’s longevity was at risk if NASCAR did not act to improve the health of its racing teams.
Prime said NASCAR became concerned about the threat of a breakaway stock car series during the 2024 charter negotiations.
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Jeffrey Kessler, an attorney for the teams, told the jury Monday that over a three-year period, nearly $400 million was paid to the France Family Trust and that a 2023 valuation by Goldman Sachs found that NASCAR was worth $5 billion. The pre-trial discovery process revealed that NASCAR earned more than $100 million in 2024.
NASCAR says it is doing nothing wrong and has not restricted trading by its teams. The series says the original charters were distributed free to teams when the system was created in 2016 and that demand for them created a $1.5 billion market in equity for chartered organizations.
The new charter agreement increased the guaranteed amount for each leased car to $12.5 million in annual revenue, up from $9 million. But Hamlin and Jenkins both said it costs $20 million to bring a single car to the track for all 38 races and that figure doesn’t include overhead, operating costs or driver salary.
Both testified that they do not have the ability to cut costs and that the teams are too dependent on outside sponsorship to survive.
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“It’s offensive to say I overspent. We have a model that works for us,” Jenkins testified. “I’ve never made a profit. And it’s not due to malpractice. The level we compete at is just very expensive.”
Prime testified to this and noted that in his consulting role he discovered in 2014 that teams lost a total of $85 million, an average of $1.3 million per car. He also learned that in the pre-charter system, when cars had to qualify for a race based on speed, a team would lose $700,000 if it failed to qualify.
The trial is expected to last two weeks and Jordan, Rick Hendrick and Roger Penske are still expected to testify. Jordan is in court every day and is sometimes demonstrative, either laughing at amusing remarks or shaking his head at testimony he disagrees with.
NASCAR is owned and operated by the France family, who founded the series in 1948.
