CHARLOTTE, N.C. — NASCAR grilled driver Denny Hamlin on cross examination Tuesday, with its lawyer portraying him as a businessman who was unhappy with good-faith negotiations and tried to warp that displeasure into an antitrust matter, but Hamlin dismissed NASCAR\u2019s claim as \u201cdoing a little word twisting.\u201d <\/p>\n
The back and forth played out during the second day of the trial between NASCAR and 23XI and Front Row Motorsports<\/a> for alleged civil antitrust violations, following the teams\u2019 lawyer\u2019s examination of Hamlin that started Monday afternoon. During that time, Hamlin laid out how his team pays annual costs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for things like credentials, WiFi at tracks and competition data. He also said he was concerned about what could happen by 23XI not signing NASCAR\u2019s final offer to renew the charter agreements, adding that the offer was \u201chorrible\u201d and \u201cabsolutely unfair\u201d and recalling how upset he was about the situation. Like he was on Monday, fellow 23XI co-owner Michael Jordan was seated in the front row of the gallery<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lawrence Buterman, an attorney at one of NASCAR\u2019s external counsels Latham & Watkins, said during his cross examination that 23XI was asking for $205M in damages, revealed Hamlin\u2019s annual salary at Joe Gibbs Racing is around $14M and claimed the damages would amount to a 900% return on investment from what 23XI had invested in the sport. Buterman repeatedly asked Hamlin whether he believed that was a fair ROI and at different points asked the three-time Daytona 500 winner if the public could trust his words because he testified that he sometimes used NASCAR talking points in public such as podcasts. Hamlin called it \u201cnonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n NASCAR also asked Hamlin whether it was a tactic of 23XI investor Curtis Polk to selectively leak developments to the press to force pressure on NASCAR with public opinion, and it said that in 2023, Hamlin asked Jordan to find a buyer for the driver\u2019s stake, suggesting Hamlin may not be committed to being a long-term owner in the sport. Hamlin responded that, at the time, there was a disagreement about 23XI\u2019s future but he was just using that request as a way to help get the attention of his fellow investors and top executives who work with Jordan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHARLOTTE, N.C. — NASCAR grilled driver Denny Hamlin on cross examination Tuesday, with its lawyer portraying him as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321265,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,12716,634,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-321264","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-motorsports","11":"tag-nascar","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}