Hendrick, Penske seeking to avoid being deposed in NASCAR lawsuit

Rick Hendrick and Roger Penske are seeking not to be deposed in NASCAR’s antitrust lawsuit, or at least, for there to be limits to any testimony they have to give.

A protective order prohibiting depositions or otherwise imposing guardrails on their testimony was filed Friday in federal court. NASCAR is being sued by two of its teams, 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports, and Hendrick and Penske previously provided declarations in the matter. But the two team owners are looking to avoid any further involvement.

“In keeping with the adage that ‘no good deed goes unpunished,’ Movants find themselves, quickly and without much warning, in the unenviable position of being offered to give expansive and unnecessary deposition testimony as a result of wrangling between the parties to a lawsuit that should have been settled long before now,” the motion states. “ … Hendrick and Penske, in view of their decades-long relationship with Jim France, agreed to give limited testimony regarding non-confidential matters at the trial of this case, but in a way that did not force them to ‘take sides’ in this lawsuit – something which both men have made clear that they cannot and will not do.

“That has now morphed into an effort by the Plaintiffs to seek testimony potentially regarding HMS’ and Penske’s highly confidential financial and other business information.”

23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports are the ones who want to depose Hendrick and Penske. But the motion states that the information the two teams want is “in large part tracks” with what NASCAR was previously prevented from receiving earlier this year. At that time, the Court denied NASCAR access to any financial information other than that which was anonymous and untraceable.

However, as Hendrick and Penske are now arguing, “The testimony that Plaintiffs now seek will undermine the entirety of the Court’s decision as related to HMS and PRS and potentially all of the Partiers (or the media or general public) to ‘reverse engineer’ the anonymized team information to back out HMS and PRS in an effort to identify the sources of the other team information.

“To be clear, neither Mr. Hendrick nor Mr. Penske would have agreed to give any testimony under these circumstances. Now they find themselves being used as bargaining chips in this litigation.”

Should the Court allow the depositions, Hendrick and Penske have asked that the guardrails limit them to what was already in their respective declarations.