Years ago, I was in the garage at Darlington Raceway chatting with David Pearson, Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough. All three are among the greatest racers in NASCAR history. All three had long since retired as drivers, but all three had only recently given up trying to be Cup Series team owners, the experience having crushed them all financially.
Yaborough said to me, "You are looking at three NASCAR dinosaurs."
Pearson laughed and replied, "But we're doing better than the dinosaurs because we're still here."
When I asked them what they'd figured out that the dinosaurs didn't, Allison explained, "We were smart enough to realize we were dinosaurs and got out of the damn way before we went extinct."
On Thursday afternoon in a Charlotte courthouse, another NASCAR dinosaur got out of the damn way.
As an antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR, filed by 23XI Racing, co-owned by Michael Jordan and three-time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin, and Front Row Motorsports (FRM), began to grind its way toward the end of its second week, the two sides announced that they had reached a settlement.
As the finer details of the agreement were still being revealed into late afternoon, there was no doubt that the victory belonged to the teams over the sanctioning body because we already knew that their ultimate goal had been achieved. In the end, this was about their fight for NASCAR to make team charters, as close as stock car racing gets to stick-and-ball franchises, permanent -- or as their attorney Jeffrey Kessler described it, "evergreen" -- as opposed to a contract-to-contract model, renewed in conjunction with NASCAR's massive media rights deals.
It is very difficult to find someone in the Cup Series paddock who does not believe this is the right move. In fact, every team in the Cup Series garage once stood with 23XI and FRM, although they eventually relented and were willing to let those two teams carry ahead with the fight alone. They won that fight, and as a result, so did every NASCAR team owner who is fortunate enough to have one of those 40 charters. No one calls this franchising, but that's essentially what it now is, in line with the business model of nearly every other big league sport, such as Jordan's longtime home, the NBA.
NASCAR lost that fight. As the trial slogged on, a defeat began to feel inevitable, for the same reason that Jordan and his team believed that the latest charter agreement, the one they refused to sign in September 2024, was unsatisfactory. A reason that everyone in that garage, including NASCAR's commissioner and president, had already talked about behind closed doors -- and in emails and texts that were revealed in and around the trial -- but no one spoke about publicly until the lawsuit forced them to.
The door to the future was being blocked by a dinosaur.
Jim France is a good man, a brilliant businessman and someone who loves auto racing on a level that few can understand. But he also never wanted the job he now holds as NASCAR's CEO and chairman. His father, Bill France, originated the position after he oversaw NASCAR's foundational meetings in 1948. His older brother, Bill France Jr., took over those duties from their father in the early 1970s and ruled the sport for three decades with a highly respected iron fist. His heir was his son Brian, whose tenure at the helm was tumultuous at best and ended prematurely in 2018.
Through it all, legendarily introverted Jim France was happy to remain in the background, racing sports cars and working in the racetrack ownership division while enjoying much sway in the NASCAR boardroom without any of the public spotlight that his father and brother both so loved and his nephew so loathed.
But when Brian France stepped down and NASCAR's leadership flowchart was unexpectedly detoured, it ran directly over Jim France's desk, whether he wanted it or not. "The Steves," NASCAR commissioner Phelps and president O'Donnell, have been the faces of that leadership, a constant paddock presence as they meet with the media and their teams. But both have always been quick to politely remind that whatever decisions they made or moves they pondered, all went through the family first, being Jim, niece Lesa France Kennedy and her son Ben.
That was clear to everyone in the sport when it came to the introduction of charters in 2016, a concept created in conjunction with team owners to help meet their financial demands. It became even clearer that everything ran through France when the latest charter agreement tug-of-war took place over the two years leading into the current agreement.
As was revealed in court, NASCAR's most powerful team owners pleaded with France personally to make their case for a more favorable charter agreement. When asked about those meetings this week, France testified that he considered them all great friends, but he was unmoved by their pleas.
As was also revealed in court, the people who worked for France were frustrated by their repeated attempts to get him to greenlight the compromises they had reached with those owners but were rebuffed by a man they were obviously referring to in text messages such as "1996 ... dictatorship," although they refused to identify that as France during their time on the stand.
At some point, during all of that, Jim France finally realized that, no, this isn't 1996, when his brother had the sport picking up speed toward an unparalleled decade of growth. Nor is it 1966, when his father was building and collecting the portfolio of speedways that are still the backbone of NASCAR and the France family fortune. This isn't even 2016, when charters were born.
Instead, we are staring into 2026. Today's world is an open book. There are no secrets. No one knows that better than NASCAR and its race teams, having had 77 years of a closed-door/closed-ledger way of doing business laid bare during this trial. For the first time, we now know how much teams and their drivers make -- and lose -- and we know how much cash flows through the sanctioning body's Daytona HQ and into the France family's bank accounts.
And when it comes to collateral damage, race fans are rightfully incensed that the commissioner of NASCAR called Richard Childress, who teamed up with Dale Earnhardt to win six Cup titles, a "stupid redneck." We now know that Joe Gibbs, a three-time Super Bowl-winning coach and five-time Cup Series champion owner, was moved to tears when he called Jim France to say "Don't do this us!" and was told it was his fault in part because spending habits on his team were reckless. The France family now knows how displeased their lieutenants have been. Hell, I didn't know that Hamlin believes that I've spent my entire career being scared of NASCAR people until he tweeted it on the eve of the trial.
Nothing says the holiday season like a vicious family fight. An airing out of long-simmering familial grievance that steps and then resteps over a line that had long been regarded as uncrossable. Your uncle finally spoke his mind about your mom's drinking. Your sister finally got it off her chest that your spouse creeps her out. Your mother-in-law, caught up in the heat of the moment, called you a bad parent and then piled on by adding that you also never split the check at family dinners.
So, once that clash has ended and everyone is done calling out hard truths that everyone in the family already knew but no one dared say aloud, the only thing worse than the shouting is the awkward silence that follows.
Where do you go from there?
On Thursday morning, Jim France stood with Michael Jordan, surrounded by NASCAR executives, members of the France family, Hamlin, and an endless sea of lawyers. As the dinosaur and the GOAT were shoulder-to-shoulder on the steps of the very courthouse where they had just held a very public family fight, that's the question that hovered over the scene like a storm cloud over the Daytona 500.
Some will say, as Jordan did after the settlement, that it was never personal, but strictly business. The business model of stock car racing is moving forward, and everyone seems to agree that's the right plan of action. But hurt feelings never heal that quickly, do they?
Few communities in sports are like NASCAR. A relatively small group of people who travel together every weekend nearly year-round. It is genuinely like a family.
It's never easy for any family to tell the patriarch he needs to hand over his car keys. You always hope he'll realize he needs to do it first. On Thursday, Jim France did just that. Not every key on the chain, but certainly more than he, his father or his brother had ever given up before.
Hopefully, it wasn't too late.