Denny Hamlin’s investment in 23XI Racing is no ordinary commitment. The No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing driver banked his entire racing legacy on creating a new Cup Series team in NASCAR along with the NBA legend Michael Jordan.
Advertisement
This deeply personal undertaking is why he was unable to play ball with every unfair rule that NASCAR put forward on the table and has filed a lawsuit against it.
23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports announced that they’d hired the infamous sports law attorney Jeffrey Kessler to represent them in an antitrust lawsuit against the officiating body.
The decisive move came after NASCAR forced teams to sign its new charter agreement earlier this month. The plaintiffs refused to oblige and chose to deal with the matter judicially.
The one question that lingers in many minds is why it is that these two teams aren’t getting in line when everyone else has. From Rick Hendrick to Richard Childress, 13 of 15 team owners have put their pens on the paper and signed where NASCAR instructed them to. But there is a slight caveat. They’ve been public about the fact that they did so under pressure.
Hamlin touched upon this on Actions Detrimental and said, “Jeffrey Kessler definitely stated it very perfectly. There’s always more victims than the plaintiffs … It only takes one to stand up for what they believe in and this is something I stand up and I believe in. I want this for my kids. They deserve to carry on the legacy of what I’ve invested back in the sport.”
Richard Childress’s admission about being pressured to sign the charter agreement
Six hours. That was the time that NASCAR gave team owners to sign the agreement on September 6. If they couldn’t send the signed papers back within the stipulated hour, their charters would get revoked. What does an owner who has hundreds of employees and stakeholders depending on him do under such conditions?
Childress told Fox Sports reporter Bob Pockrass in Talladega, “We got our Docusign that evening. 6:37 is when it came in, and we had to sign by 12:00, or we would lose our charters.”
“I didn’t have a choice because we had to sign. I got over 400 Employees, OEM in contract, contracts with sponsors, and I gotta take care of my team,” he added.
Hendrick had expressed similar sentiments in earlier interviews. These owners have been in the sport for a long time now and enjoy many of its privileges. Hamlin, however, is just getting started.
It is only natural for him to want better returns on his investment that would benefit his family. Either way, the coming times are going to be filled with turbulence and it is too early to guess who will walk out as the winner.
