The term of the charter agreement is for seven years starting in 2025 and commensurate with NASCAR’s new media rights deals that begin next year, meaning teams who signed on did not get the permanency of the system they had been negotiating for in recent years.
Teams are getting more revenue as part of the deal, which stems from NASCAR getting a 40% increase in its media rights agreements worth $7.7B. For example, the last-place charter got around $4-5M annually in the old charter agreement from 2016-24, while that will go up to around $8.5M in the new version from 2025-31, people familiar with the matter said.
23XI Racing co-owner Curtis Polk described the battle between his team and NASCAR as “David facing Goliath,” indicating the organization — with fellow co-owners Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin — was nowhere close to signing the proposed extension of NASCAR’s charter agreement with teams.
Polk said while other teams “may have felt pressured and compelled to sign the agreement under significant duress,” 23XI viewed the terms as “particularly harmful to our operations and our ownership group’s interests and intellectual property rights.”
The other holdout among owners, Bob Jenkins of Front Row Motorsports, said his team’s concerns “are very similar to those raised by 23XI” and said it wasn’t feasible for Front Row to sign the extension on short notice.
So where does this leave 23XI and Front Row, after NASCAR threatened to revoke charters from those who did not sign by the midnight Friday deadline? That is unclear, and no decision has been reached by NASCAR, which declined to comment for this story.
Not all team owners were so dissatisfied with the new charter agreement.
“There are elements I really like and there are some things that are to be desired,” said one team owner. “It’s a better agreement than we currently have now. I feel like I can build a business model around it.”
One long-time team executive said he respected the new teams for trying to help build the sport through being firm in negotiations, but said, “I’ve been here when we didn’t have the (charter system) in place and this current system is much better.”
