Twenty-five years ago, Richard Childress sat atop the peak of NASCAR’s explosive growth.
Six NASCAR Cup Series championships with Dale Earnhardt. Wins in the sport’s crown jewel races from the Daytona 500 to the Brickyard 400 to the Southern 500.
His team’s success, through Earnhardt, was built directly on a blue-collar foundation of fandom that sold out racetracks all over the country. Millions showed up.
Today? He’s exhibit A at the funeral.
“Childress needs to be taken out back and flogged,” NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps once wrote in a text message, revealed last week for the world to see. “He’s a stupid redneck who owes his entire fortune to NASCAR.”
The insult was part of an unsealed exhibit as a lawsuit between NASCAR and two of its race teams heads to trial starting Dec. 1. It’s a dispute between 23XI Racing, Front Row Motorsports and the sport at large that’s dragged all of stock car racing inside an uncontained five-alarm fire.
Here’s What Happened in the 23XI/FRM vs. NASCAR Lawsuit This Week (Nov. 22-28)
The flames only get fanned the second the gavel drops on this trial. But no outcome here fixes irreparable harm already inflicted on this Jenga tower’s wobbly lower level: owners and fans who serve as NASCAR’s foundation. They’ve spent their hard-earned money supporting it and, at one time, supercharged its growth to a level rivaling any sport in the country outside the NFL.
Childress, himself on the witness list for the trial, reacted the way anyone would under the circumstances: with verbal venom and potential legal action behind it.
“These comments reflect the way certain NASCAR executives have historically viewed and treated many team owners like Mr. Childress who have devoted their lives to strengthening the sport for its fans, its sponsors and all who compete in it,” a Richard Childress Racing spokesperson said in a statement last week.
“RCR and Richard Childress are equally disappointed for the NASCAR fans, with whom Mr. Childress closely identifies given his humble and hard-working background.”
You would think from those quotes alone that Childress would be saddling up alongside 23XI and FRM in court. Those two teams are claiming NASCAR is a monopoly, utilizing heavy-handed, Mafioso styles of negotiation to maintain control of an organization that solely enriches them.
But that’s where you’d be wrong. Childress is actually part of a group fighting to stop the trial, urging last month both sides to settle before the torrential downpour ripping the sport into pieces gets any worse. He joined longtime owners Rick Hendrick, Roger Penske, Joe Gibbs and five other teams on NASCAR’s side looking to ensure the upcoming case doesn’t fundamentally change stock car racing as we know it.
“Undoing what we have collectively negotiated will not only result in immeasurable damage to our sport and our respective businesses,” Hendrick wrote in said filing. “It will, most importantly, hurt the people and families that depend on us for their livelihoods.”
It’s easy to get lost in the avalanche of paperwork drowning the case. Thousands of pages of documents have been released surrounding the sport’s financial system, structure and long-term business strategy. But you don’t need a Ph. D in mathematics or psychology to see the weirdness of an owner in Childress siding with the same people he’ll potentially sue as soon as this court case is over.
It’s because the so-called rednecks have no place to go, filled with so much fear over what comes next. Like so many race fans these days, they’re damned if they support the current structure and potentially damned if they don’t.
Should the NASCAR/Childress/scared owners faction win this case, any hint of future rebellion will be vanquished. NASCAR, although battered and bruised, will remain the authoritarian leader of a sport burdened with a viewership, cultural and competitive decline. The current leadership, even while suffering through a public relations nightmare, will be given a legal backing that could ensure its long-term survival.
Who has been hurt by everyone’s choice to hug the Titanic? The fans, whose support has been wavering after uneven decisions by NASCAR executives the past two decades (playoffs, car construction, rules) left the sport hardly recognizable to its turn-of-the-century version. It’s hard to find a world post-NASCAR trial win where those in power, even if Phelps and NASCAR President Steve O’Donnell get replaced, ultimately wind up changing course.
And what if 23XI and FRM win? Nobody knows. What we can say is those plaintiffs on the other side of the aisle — 23XI, FRM, their lawyer Jeffrey Kessler — all talk a great game. They just aren’t the blue-collar fan base rooting for the Earnhardt-Jeff Gordon rivalry back in the 1990s. Their push for parity brings a completely different set of ideas and opportunity to the sport; just like option one, it’s an evolution that holds little to no resemblance to what fans of the old-time NASCAR hold close to their heart.
Judge Kenneth Bell, presiding over the case, said as much to each side, warning a victory for 23XI/FRM may cause unpredictable consequences. The charter system as we know it could be completely wiped out, leaving potential new owners unprotected against losing sponsorship. That’s a hard sell to any potential new group of investors considering the recent declines.
NASCAR’s entire fleet of racetracks could also be sold to the highest bidder (and then divvied up not for racing but for real estate and industrial development). Rival race series could be given an opening to jumpstart, the precursor to an IRL/CART-style split that devastated open-wheel racing in the 1990s.
A ton of power, of course, with a 23XI win would land on the shoulders of three-time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin and the best NBA player of our time, Michael Jordan. How will they handle the alienation of the very so-called rednecks who felt like lighting a torch to the entire NASCAR project was the wrong answer? We’re only talking nine of the most powerful, influential ownership teams the sport has to offer, themselves holding millions in their hands. A decision for them to desert would cripple the NASCAR 2.0 Hamlin, Jordan, et al. stand to inherit.
Nowhere on the list of witnesses are the fans who used to spend a week camping out during the August weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway. The waiting list to get a ticket for that race used to rival the one the Green Bay Packers use for season tickets. Now? It doesn’t even sell out. The number of seats at tracks have been cut significantly the past decade due to a lack of demand. Their opinions come without the real prize: millions at stake both sides are clamoring for.
Denny Hamlin Opens Up in 1st Podcast Since Phoenix Heartbreak
What, on either side, will result from this trial which will increase demand for NASCAR over time? Fans follow this sport for entertainment, not legal analysis, after all. But for all the posturing, discussion and controversy in this case, that’s the question no one seems to be able to answer.
My money, in a best-case scenario, is on some potential long-term growth down the line if 23XI/FRM win the case. But even then, the fan they’re envisioning in a new-school NASCAR and the direction the sport may evolve may not feel so inclusive to those who have championed the sport for the past 40 years or so. Their visions of the past may soon clash precipitously with a future they had no hand in creating.
Childress would take the term redneck and hold it as a badge of honor. There’s a whole lot of people who would join him, like it or not, and the door’s now been closed politely behind them as the fire burns.
For everyone’s sake, I hope the people who finally put it out know what they’re doing.
Follow Tom Bowles on X at @NASCARBowles
Majority Owner and Editor in Chief at Frontstretch
The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 40+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1’s former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.