CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In the 1990 film “Days of Thunder,” there is a scene in which Big John — a character modeled after NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. — threatens a pair of feuding racers.
Tired of the on-track antics between drivers loosely based on Dale Earnhardt and a combination of Geoff Bodine and Tim Richmond, Big John warns of the consequences to come if they don’t stop wrecking each other.
“You trade paint one more time, you so much as touch, I’m going to black flag the two of you,” Big John says, “and take apart your race cars for 300 laps. Then, if you pass inspection and you put your cars back together, I might let you back into the race.”
There was some truth in that scene in that NASCAR, its inspectors, race control officials and executives are in charge and can interpret the rules as they see fit. It has played out over and over since NASCAR was formed by the France family in 1948: A car has trouble passing inspection for some sort of infraction, or the same team finds that it has been “randomly selected” for a thorough teardown week after week.
Should 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports be worried?
After all, those two teams just filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR alleging “anti-competitive terms” in the charter agreement reached last month with other Cup Series teams. The lawsuit is going to be a topic for the rest of the season, which is now well into the playoffs and down to the final six races of 2024 for the top-tier circuit.
The co-owners of 23XI Racing include retired NBA great Michael Jordan and three-time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin, who actively drives for Joe Gibbs Racing. The 23XI team fields cars for Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick, who won the Cup Series regular-season championship this year. Hamlin and Reddick are both racing for the Cup Series title.
Front Row does not have any drivers in the playoffs, but that doesn’t mean that Bob Jenkins’ cars won’t be subjected to intense scrutiny starting Friday when the garage opens for inspection at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway.
Hamlin, who has already been dealt one severe penalty this season, said he hopes there is no retribution by NASCAR toward him, the cars he owns, his teammates at JGR or the Front Row drivers.
“I have enough faith in them that they’re going to be professionals,” Hamlin said. “They can separate Denny the driver that’s on the race track on Sunday from Denny that’s the owner on Monday through Friday. Certainly, there’s been things in the past that have been conspiracy theories, but you can’t get into that stuff.
“Certainly, they’ll respect myself and my (JGR) team because right now the most important thing to me is trying to run for this championship over the next six weeks.”
Hamlin’s 54 Cup Series career wins are more than any other driver in history without winning a championship, although he is perennial contender, but at 43 years old he doesn’t want to waste any opportunities.
AP photo by John Bazemore / Denny Hamlin (11) and Kurt Busch (1) lead the field to the start of a NASCAR Cup Series race at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway in October 2020. The 2.66-mile track will host a Cup Series playoff race Sunday.Talladega is a tricky track with strict rules designed for safety purposes that can be arbitrarily applied. For example, a yellow line circles the 2.66-mile superspeedway, and drivers are prohibited from using it to gain position or to force another driver below the line to preserve position.
It is the officials in the NASCAR scoring tower who rule on such violations, and the process was never more scrutinized than in 2008, when Tony Stewart was declared the winner at Talladega even though Regan Smith beat him to the finish line. Smith had gone below the yellow line to edge ahead of Stewart, who had clearly forced Smith beyond track limits with a blocking maneuver.
Smith believed he was robbed by NASCAR’s ruling.
“I always got told that the rule is, if you get forced down there, then you’re the winner of the race, and on the last lap, anything goes,” Smith said that day. “I got forced down there.”
Just one year earlier in a third-tier Truck Series race at Daytona International Speedway, another superspeedway, Johnny Benson went below the yellow line in a three-wide finish. NASCAR said at the time that Benson’s move was legal because the rule had wiggle room: if a driver can see the checkered flag waving, then essentially anything goes over the final push to the finish line.
Come this Sunday, if Hamlin or Reddick or any of the drivers whose teams are involved in litigation against NASCAR find themselves near the yellow line, who knows how the ruling might go?
Front Row and 23XI have hired Jeffrey Kessler, a top antitrust attorney, to represent them. He said he was not concerned.
“My experience is that having a lot of cases against sports leagues, sports organizations, is that their lawyers advise them, ‘Do not mess around with the other side because that’s the worst thing you can do’ when I call on them in court,” Kessler said. “We don’t usually see players face retribution, we don’t see our other plaintiffs face retribution, and I would be surprised if it happens here. But if it happens, we certainly know what to do about it.”
Hamlin heads to Talladega fifth in the playoff standings, which is already down to 12 drivers after starting with 16 last month. Reddick, who won a Cup Series race at Talladega in April, is ninth and could be eliminated from the playoffs if he doesn’t move into the top eight after next week’s elimination race on the road-and-oval course at North Carolina’s Charlotte Motor Speedway.