23XI Racing, Front Row Motorsports Make Great Arguments

On Tuesday (Nov. 4), NASCAR and two of its race teams finally met in court to argue their cases for and against a preliminary injunction.

After reading the arguments made in court between NASCAR and 23XI Racing/Front Row Motorsports, and after a month of lawsuits and responses and all of the legal documents, my initial feeling on this case continues to bear fruit.

NASCAR is a monopoly. Throughout its history, it has used a number of anti-competitive measures that, while not directly counter to a specific competitor, have stopped one from rising up.

And I mean throughout its history. The 1950 NASCAR Cup Series championship is generally considered illegitimate because a number of drivers such as Lee Petty had their points taken away.

Why was this? Because NASCAR had a rule on the books at the time that dictated any drivers that competed in another stock car series would have all Cup points forfeited from them at that point of the season.

NASCAR was not the behemoth it is now in 1950, which was just its third year in operation. There were a number of stock car series throughout the southeast, some of which competed well with NASCAR. Arguably the two largest series were NASCAR and the Sam Nunis-led AAA stock car series.

Nunis is an extremely important figure in NASCAR’s history because he was the person who once told Bill France years earlier to stop declaring individual races as national championships. Instead, he argued, France should distribute points to decide a champion at the end of the year.

Those other stock car series essentially went away following the first Southern 500 late in the 1950 season. Following that race, NASCAR was the biggest series that promoted the biggest race in the South, with the second biggest being the traditional Daytona Beach and Road Course races held in the late winter.

After AAA and then USAC started fizzling out its stock car series and ended in 1984, there have been just two stock car series counter to NASCAR that have had any year-to-year success.

The Superstar Racing Experience lasted three six-race seasons from 2021 to 2023. All of SRX’s point people throughout its existence were adamant that they were not competition for NASCAR.

Still, the SRX business model failed to work out. Fans liked the series when they gave it a chance, but it was never going to grow into a series comparable to NASCAR. Staying at the level it was did not work out, and with no NASCAR support, it…