NASCAR antitrust trial: Bob Jenkins testifies about $100M loss and 'insulting' charter deal

But he said he has lost $100 million since becoming a team owner in the early 2000s and that's even with a 2001 victory in the Daytona 500. His love of the sport and belief that it can be profitable have kept him going, but what he believes is a no-win revenue model 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 became offended by NASCAR's “take-it-or-leave-it” offer on charter agreements.

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 designated percentage of revenue. Front Row was one of the teams that received two charters for free when NASCAR created the system in 2016 and Jenkins thought the agreements were lousy then — but a step in the right direction.

All 15 Sprint Cup organizations fought for more than two years for better terms on the charter extensions that began this year. But when NASCAR's final offer was presented at 6 p.m. on a Friday last year with six hours to sign the 112-page document, Jenkins balked because it went “virtually backward in so many ways.

“It was insulting, it went so far backward," he testified Wednesday. "NASCAR wanted to run the governance with an iron fist, it was like taxation without representation. NASCAR has the right to do whatever it wants.”

He said he was "honestly very hurt” by the sequence of events and believed NASCAR “knew we had to blindly sign it. Some of these owners have $500-$600 million facilities, long-term sponsors. They couldn’t walk away from that.”

Jenkins testified that Joe Gibbs personally apologized to Jenkins for signing the deal, and most owners reluctantly signed the agreement.

“Not a single owner said, ‘I was happy to sign it.’ Not a single one,” he testified. “100% of the owners think the charter system is good,” Jenkins said. “The charter agreement is not.”

Front Row and 23XI were the only two organizations out of 15 that refused to sign and instead went to court in a trial that could completely rework NASCAR's framework.

The extensions ended more than two years of bitter negotiations in which neither NASCAR or the teams budged.

Team losses

NASCAR executive vice president in charge of strategy Scott Prime testified Wednesday that a study he worked on as a consultant found the longevity of the sport was in danger if NASCAR didn’t act to improve the health of their race teams.

Prime said NASCAR became concerned about the threat of a breakaway stock car series during 2024 charter negotiations.

Jeffrey Kessler, attorney for the teams, told the jury Monday that over a three-year period almost $400 million was paid to the France Family Trust and a 2023 evaluation by Goldman Sachs found NASCAR to be worth $5 billion. The pretrial discovery process revealed NASCAR made more than $100 million in 2024.

NASCAR contends it is doing nothing wrong and has not restrained trade or commerce by its teams. The series says the original charters were given for free to teams when the system was created in 2016 and the demand for them created a market of $1.5 billion in equity for chartered organizations.

The new charter agreement upped the guaranteed money for every chartered car to $12.5 million in annual revenue, from $9 million. But Hamlin and Jenkins have both testified it costs $20 million to bring a single car to the track for all 38 races and that figure does not include any overhead, operating costs or a driver’s salary.

Both testified they don’t have the ability to slash costs and teams are too reliant on outside sponsorship to survive.

“It’s offensive to say I’ve overspent. We have a model that works for us,” Jenkins testified. “I have never turned a profit. And it’s not from malpractice. The level we compete at is just so expensive.”

Prime testified as much and noted in his consulting role he discovered in 2014 that teams lost a combined $85 million, or an average of $1.3 million a car. He also learned that under the system before charters, when cars had to qualify for a race based on speed, a team would lose $700,000 if it failed to make the field.

The trial is expected to last two weeks with Jordan, Rick Hendrick and Roger Penske still set to testify. Jordan has been in court each day and is occasionally demonstrative, either laughing at funny remarks or shaking his head at testimony he disagrees with.

NASCAR is owned and operated by the France family, which founded the series in 1948.

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