Yesterday 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports made headlines with their lawsuit against NASCAR for having a monopoly on professional stock car racing. So, where does it go from here, and why did these two teams decide to take legal action against the sanctioning body?

23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports have entered new territory. With Jeffrey Kessler and his associates on this case, it feels like some major change is coming to NASCAR. Kessler has worked on and been successful in some of the largest sports labor litigation in American history.

NFL free agency, USWNT equal pay, NIL in the NCAA – all of that and more has had Kessler’s hand in it. Now he’s involved in the 23XI lawsuit.

Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic called the 23XI lawsuit a “Hail Mary” move on The Teardown with Jeff Gluck.

“What is the only thing we [23XI, Front Row] can do? And that is go to court and it’s to go convince 12 people on a jury that this is a monopoly and have them decide what the penalty is,” Bianchi explained. “I don’t see what else they could do. I mean they can continue to run as an open car, which that doesn’t do anything because you’re going to lose millions of dollars. So, this was the play. This is the Hail Mary, this is it. Everything comes down to this. You know, it’s fascinating, and you go through everything.

‘They talked about buying the ARCA series, third-rate series, let’s calm down. But to a jury, they don’t necessarily know the difference. They can just see, hey they bought another competitor of a stock car series. I was talking to a team owner today and he was like, at first this morning, he was like ‘Ehh, yeah, eh, I don’t know where this is going to go.’ Then he called me back, he’s like, ‘I don’t know, you start looking at this, you start looking at this. As long as you don’t get too far into the weeds and you just kind of leave it on a very basic level and you just say, hey, they bought this series, they bought a bunch of tracks.’

“Because again, a lot of the tracks they bought, if you spin it the right way in court and you say to a jury, ‘Well they bought all these tracks and they brought them in-house so they can do whatever they want.’ And you can show, hey, we took a date away from this track, and we took a date away from this track and they’re dictating all these things, they look at this, the totality of it and like, oh they did X, Y, and Z, yeah I can see that.”

This is unprecedented in NASCAR. 23XI Racing and Front Row are making a strong argument in the lawsuit. From the tracks, to overall professional stock car competition, and even the Next Gen car. There are at least elements of a monopoly, if not an outright one.

When Michael Jordan got into NASCAR, he was here to stay. He takes his ownership role very seriously. It is obvoius that he and Denny Hamlin and Curtis Polk are together in this. They have invested a ton of money into 23XI Racing. Now, they want to see a return on that investment in a fair market.

Do you think this lawsuit will be successful? Will Jim France go to trial or settle any way possible? It feels like a line has been crossed and there is no going back.

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