This article is part of the “Beyond the Track” series, a dive on the surrounding scene, glamor and culture that makes a Grand Prix.

Max Verstappen’s fightback from 17th on the grid to win Sunday’s Sao Paulo Grand Prix will go down as one of the most important victories of his Formula One career.

Not only did it snap a 10-race streak without a victory (practically a lifetime by Verstappen’s standards), but as Lando Norris slipped from pole position to only finish sixth, the win also put Verstappen on the brink of clinching his fourth world championship.

It was a huge power shift, extinguishing hope that Norris could keep the title race alive to the finale in Abu Dhabi. And now, Verstappen could be crowned champion at the Las Vegas Grand Prix on Nov. 23.

Last year’s first running of the race along the famed Las Vegas Strip was a major milestone for F1. The sport spent over half a billion dollars to make the event happen, including a new, permanent paddock building that serves as its home in the United States, as well as serving as the promoter to run the grand prix. The circuit made sure to incorporate the famed Strip and Sphere, creating a spectacular visual event against the night sky.

Despite a difficult start to the race weekend with the cancellation of first practice and frustration over the scheduling, Las Vegas was one of the best races of the season, including an open fight for the lead that went down to the final laps and universal praise for the high-speed street track layout.

Verstappen, an early critic of the race for being “99 percent show and one percent sporting event,” sang “Viva Las Vegas” over his radio after crossing the line. Even he bought into the spectacle that had doubled down on being truly Vegas.

Although there are plans to tone down some off-track demands on the drivers and focus more on the local community, the current championship picture means Las Vegas has a chance to secure a place in F1 history.

Unlike last year, when Verstappen clinched the title four races earlier in Qatar, Las Vegas now must consider how to prepare for Verstappen’s coronation as a four-time world champion.

And the organizers would likely make it a championship celebration to remember.

How Verstappen can win the championship in Las Vegas

There is a straightforward scenario for Verstappen to secure the championship in Las Vegas: beat Norris in the race on Saturday night.

Verstappen is 62 points clear, with 86 still available in the drivers’ championship. If he is 60 points ahead of Norris by the end of the Las Vegas Grand Prix race weekend, then the title race is over.

Norris, the in-form driver before his difficult Sunday in Brazil, can keep the championship going to Qatar the following week by winning in Las Vegas. Finishing second or third would also stave off a title defeat, so long as Verstappen finishes behind and does not score the fastest lap bonus point. If Norris finishes between fourth and seventh, he would need to cross the line two places clear of Verstappen to keep the championship going.

The upshot of the place permutations is that Norris must outscore Verstappen by three points to carry things on to Qatar.

If Norris can put in the same kind of dominant display as he did in Singapore (F1’s most recent street race, where he won by 20 seconds), then it would put plans for a Las Vegas championship celebration on ice. Verstappen would face the prospect of clinching the title in Qatar for a second consecutive year.

But a team to watch out for in Las Vegas is Ferrari. Charles Leclerc led the team to a 1-2 finish at last month’s United States Grand Prix before teammate Carlos Sainz dominated in Mexico en route to victory. The Las Vegas track layout, complete with some tight, technical corners, should suit the strengths of the Ferrari car in a similar fashion to the circuit in Mexico. Leclerc took pole position last year in Las Vegas and was in contention for victory until the closing stages, eventually pulling off a last-lap overtake on Sergio Pérez to grab second place.

Ferrari’s form and Red Bull’s recent struggles in dry conditions mean that Verstappen wrapping up the title in Las Vegas is no sure thing. Post-race in Brazil, where the wet weather certainly helped his case, Verstappen seemed more optimistic about the team’s performance than he had been lately.

“I’m confident for the last three races that we can fight again, and especially in the race that we will be more competitive,” he said.

A dream scenario for Las Vegas

Any grand prix would love the status of being the race where a championship is won. But the thought of Verstappen clinching the championship in Las Vegas will excite many within F1.

Despite criticism from local groups over the disruption caused by the race’s lead-up and some fans’ frustration over the price of attending, last year’s first running of the Las Vegas Grand Prix was a huge commercial success for both F1 and the city.

A study by Clark County reported an estimated economic impact of $1.5 billion, over half of which was fueled by visitor spending. From a wider cultural perspective, a primetime Saturday night slot, starting at 10 p.m. PT, put F1 up there with the top sporting properties in Las Vegas and boasted a celebrity pull that took the race beyond its usual realms of coverage.

A general view of fireworks after the Las Vegas Grand Prix. (Clive Mason/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

Las Vegas wanted to put on a show unlike anything F1 had ever seen. As impressive as the race looked on TV and for those on the ground, there was no substitute for the on-track product: a spectacular race that included plenty of overtakes and an open fight for the victory, even if it ended in yet another Verstappen win, excited fans and meant the event lived up to the considerable hype.

F1’s improved competitive picture compared to 2023, when a Verstappen victory was almost accepted as part of proceedings, has already resulted in a boost for several circuits. Bobby Epstein, the chairman of the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, said that when Verstappen’s 2024 domination ended this summer, the track saw an uptick in ticket sales for the United States GP in October. It ended up being a sell-out event.

The same boost is likely to help Las Vegas. The race organizers have always claimed that Las Vegas is often a last-minute market, and there was a later marketing push for this year’s race that started in earnest with 100 days to go. That build-up of late interest may accelerate with the possibility of it being the championship decider.

It would also give the race organizers the chance to give a distinctly Las Vegas flavor to any championship celebrations. Following last year’s grand prix, the top three finishers were chauffered in a limo from parc ferme to the Bellagio, where they conducted interviews in front of the famed fountain before returning to the grid for the podium ceremony as a huge fireworks display erupted over the city.

Given the involvement of the local casinos, who are partners of the event, and their penchant for high-end hospitality and, where required, extravagance, getting involved in any potential championship celebrations will be highly appealing. There will be a degree of gambling involved – fittingly for Las Vegas – in how thorough any preparations for marking the championship win will be, considering it’s far from a sure thing for Verstappen.

Las Vegas is leaning on the fact it has a “playbook” and hasn’t required the same kind of disruption as last year to get the track complete going into year two. It now wants to be a race for everybody, focusing on accessibility. But given the enormity of the effort by F1 to make the race happen and the white-hot spotlight that was placed upon Las Vegas last year, to add in the coronation of a champion in what has been a classic season will inevitably be a huge source of excitement to the organizers – and the fans planning to attend.

For Verstappen, he doesn’t care where the championship is won. So long as he does it.

“I just want clean races to the end,” he said after his Brazil win. “I’m not thinking about clinching the championship in Vegas or whatever. I just want clean races.”

The Beyond the Track series is part of a partnership with Chanel.

The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.

Top photo: Chris Graythen/Getty Images

In 1990, 34-year-old Carol Stiff, a basketball junkie who spent years coaching small college ball in the Northeast, packed away her clipboard and took an entry-level programmer position at what she considered a “little company” in Bristol, Conn.

Basketball had long been a part of Stiff’s life. Her uncle Don Donoher was one of Bobby Knight’s assistant coaches on the 1984 Olympic gold medal-winning team led by Michael Jordan. By middle school, she was playing youth basketball in Bernardsville, N.J., and one of her fondest memories was going to Madison Square Garden as a teenager with her mom in 1977 to watch Montclair State star Carol “Blaze” Blazejowski as part of a doubleheader called the Hanover Classic. It was the rare opportunity to see the top competitors play the game Stiff loved.

Despite an 11 a.m. tip-off, there was a crowd of over 10,000 people in MSG to see Blaze, whose scoring prowess and all-around game drew comparisons to Pete Maravich. Blaze could shoot. She could pass. She played with flair. Even without a three-point line, she scored 52 points.

“All of a sudden a light bulb went off,” Stiff said of the game. It showed her that the women’s game could thrive under the right circumstances. At her high school, after the boys’ team received Converse Chuck Taylors, the girls did, too, thanks to Title IX. But even that highlighted her beloved sport’s plight: It was rarely viewed as worthy enough on its own. But when the circumstances were right, its greatness could be seen.

Stiff played basketball and field hockey at Southern Connecticut State. Then, following coaching stints at Brown, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Western Connecticut, she joined ESPN.

One of her first tasks at the network was to input four-digit codes for all the programming, recording what was on each hour. She noticed that the format didn’t distinguish if games were played by men or women. In her third year, during a software redesign, she convinced her boss they should add a gender code. It was the first time the network tracked when women’s sports were on — or not — at the network.

Last April, the NCAA women’s national championship game between undefeated South Carolina and Iowa in Cleveland drew nearly 19 million television viewers, the largest audience in women’s college basketball history, and the most-watched basketball game — men’s or women’s — since 2019. Earlier games in the 2024 women’s tournament drew 14.2 million and 12.3 million viewers, respectively, and those followed a 2023 final watched by nearly 10 million, which had been an all-time high.

Why the interest in women’s basketball spiked is no mystery: the immense popularity of Caitlin Clark, the former Iowa and current Indiana Fever star. “There’s (Michael) Jordan, Tiger (Woods) and Caitlin,” said Fox president of insight and analytics Mike Mulvihill.

But before Clark turbocharged the awareness and popularity of women’s basketball, a foundation had to be built, ready and waiting for someone like her. It was constructed by people like Stiff, devotees of the game who long believed the structure and biases of the media business were holding it back. They pushed for more, fought for change, and set the stage on which Clark arrived.

“That stigma that was hanging over women’s sports for so many years — that it’s not athletic, it’s not fun to watch, it’s less than men’s — is being lifted,” said Sue Maryott, the Big Ten Network’s vice president of remote productions. “I think it all started with exposure. People weren’t watching because it wasn’t televised.”

In her third year at ESPN, and just weeks before the 1993-94 college basketball season began, Stiff was tasked with constructing ESPN’s women’s broadcast schedule. She assigned the games for each conference in the time slots she was given, typically Sunday afternoons. A year later, the slots given to her included a 3 p.m. ESPN spot on Martin Luther King Day in January. At the time, it was not considered coveted real estate, but Stiff wanted to make the most of it.

After first failing to get defending national champion North Carolina to agree to a game against UConn, an up-and-coming program in nearby Storrs, Stiff called Pat Summitt, Tennessee’s coach. Summitt had concerns about fitting the game on her schedule and didn’t love the idea of taking her team north in the winter. Stiff made her pitch, sounding like a coach trying to reel in a big recruit, noting that Robin Roberts — a former Division I player and an up-and-coming TV star — would be calling the game. Summitt finally agreed to do it: “For the good of the game.”

The teams entered undefeated, with UConn ranked No. 1 and Tennessee No. 2. A sold-out crowd of 8,241 saw the Huskies beat the Volunteers, 77-66, and the contest recorded a strong 1.0 rating (635,000 households). It was the first game in what would become the greatest rivalry in women’s college basketball history.

However, there were no postgame interviews. A repeat of “The Sports Reporters” had to be rushed onto ESPN.

On Nov. 30, 1996, 30-year-old Brent Clark and 27-year-old Anne Nizzi were married at Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in West Des Moines, Iowa. The next day, the Iowa and Iowa State women’s basketball teams resumed their rivalry after a five-year break at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City. The Hawkeyes won, 64-53, before an announced crowd of 5,061. The game was not televised.

During the 1994-95 women’s college basketball season, Connecticut went 35-0 en route to a national championship, becoming only the second women’s team to complete a season undefeated. The team’s star, Rebecca Lobo, was the most visible women’s basketball player since USC’s Cheryl Miller in the 1980s. Lobo appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman,” and she and her teammates were featured on the “Live with Regis & Kathy Lee” morning show.

As a kid, Lobo watched women’s basketball every chance she got. “Which means I didn’t watch it at all,” she said. She cut out pictures of Miller from Sports Illustrated and placed them in her locker. As the 1996 Olympics approached, Lobo had become something never seen before in the women’s game: a bonafide media sensation, even if she was a bit player on the star-studded Team USA.

The U.S. women won gold, boosting the launch of the WNBA the next year. The first WNBA season consisted of 28 regular-season games for each team with the national broadcasts split between NBC, ESPN and Lifetime. There were three playoff games, with the one-game semifinals simulcast on ESPN and Lifetime, while the Finals were on NBC.

That same year, ESPN won the broadcast rights to the NCAA women’s championship, taking it from CBS. Over the years, CBS turned out some big numbers, most notably with 11.84 million viewers for the 1983 final featuring Miller. However, the network failed to grow the game. ESPN won the rights by offering to air more games and by being willing to have a day of rest for the teams between the national semifinals and the final, which Stiff and others urged the network to put into its offer.

“We got the NCAA deal done. Then the Olympics and then the WNBA, it was like a trifecta,” Stiff said.

In late June 1997, in front of an announced crowd of 17,780, the New York Liberty, led by Lobo and Teresa Weatherspoon, beat Phoenix, 65-57 in Lobo’s first WNBA game.

“The crowd was not just women. It was dads who wanted their child, boy or girl, to see it and have aspirations,” said Blazejowski.

By then, Blaze had retired as a player and was the Liberty’s GM.

In January 2002, The Des Moines Register listed 25 birth notices from three Des Moines-area hospitals on page 5B. The child born to Brent Clark and Anne Nizzi-Clark was simply listed as “daughter.”

Caitlin Clark, like Carol Stiff, was born into a sports family. Her father, Brent, was inducted into the Simpson (Iowa) College Athletics Hall of Fame as a basketball and baseball player. Her maternal grandfather, Bob Nizzi, coached high school football at West Des Moines Dowling Catholic, one of Iowa’s dynastic large-school programs.

She had a large extended family on her mother’s side, but as one of the few girls, Clark was teased relentlessly and developed an obsessive desire to prove herself to her older cousins. Clark was 5 when she expressed an interest in playing basketball, but there were no teams in central Iowa for girls that young, so her father signed her up for boys teams that he coached. By the second grade, she was so dominant that parents complained that a girl shouldn’t be allowed to play with the boys.

In 2000, another star emerged at UConn.

“It was the Diana Taurasi era, when all the guys on SportsCenter could say her name,” Stiff said. “It was almost like, ‘She plays like Larry Bird.’”

Still, Stiff was frustrated. Sports TV can be a chicken-and-egg game. Events don’t receive prime-time slots unless they deliver big ratings. But it is difficult to earn the highest numbers without the best slots.

“So I’d hear, ‘Carol, it doesn’t rate,’” Stiff remembered. “I’d say, ‘It doesn’t rate, because no one can see it.’ They say, ‘Carol, it doesn’t rate so advertisers don’t want to buy it.’ It was that vicious cycle.”

Stiff mostly had to work with time slots on Sundays, competing with the NFL or the final round of some PGA event — often with Tiger Woods charging to a win.

“I kept fighting over the years for better windows,” Stiff said. “‘I need better windows, guys. All I get is Sunday afternoons? Are you kidding me?”

Finally, in 2005, ESPN gave the women’s game Big Mondays on ESPN2. Yet it was a bittersweet development. Those games were up against the men’s version of Big Monday that featured behemoths like Duke and North Carolina.

Three years later, Maya Moore arrived at UConn and led the Huskies to two undefeated seasons, four Final Fours and two national championships. She was a bigger guard who could dribble, shoot and pass — an earlier version of Caitlin Clark — and she was twice named national player of the year. Sports Illustrated labeled her “the greatest winner in the history of women’s basketball.”

Yet for most of Moore’s time in Storrs, many of her games were shown only on Connecticut Public Television.

In 2012, 10-year-old Clark traveled with her family three hours north from Des Moines to Minneapolis to attend a Minnesota Lynx WNBA game and see her favorite player: Moore, who was in her second season with the Lynx.

The Clark family watched the Lynx play the Seattle Storm, then lingered afterward. Moore and a few other Lynx players remained on the court, and Clark couldn’t contain herself. She sprinted toward Moore.

“I didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a Sharpie, I just gave her a hug and I ran away,” Clark said. “And she just gave me a hug back. It’s just something that’s stuck with me, that one interaction can change somebody’s life.”

Around that time, Clark was known by youth sports coaches in central Iowa as an excellent basketball player and also an elite soccer talent. On April 26, 2013, a photo of Clark appeared for the first time in The Des Moines Register. She was pictured with her U11 team from the West Des Moines Soccer Club. The name of her team:

Blaze.

After the final of the 2015 women’s World Cup in Canada produced the largest soccer audience in United States history, executives at Fox had a brainstorm.

Fox received the Women’s World Cup rights as something of a throw-in with the men’s World Cup contract. There was no extra fee. It won big merely by amplifying a property it already owned. Executives knew that the rights to Big Ten women’s basketball were similarly baked into the men’s rights that Fox controlled.

At the same time, with entertainment moving off ad-supported broadcast networks to streaming services like Netflix, fewer women were watching TV. “We’ve felt for a while that we’ve got a clear incentive to try to build out that female audience,” said Mulvihill, the Fox president of insight and analytics.

Fox’s large ownership stake in the Big Ten Network allowed it to use that channel as an incubator. Fox executives programmed a large slate of women’s games on the Big Ten Network and sat back and watched.

Clark’s cousin Audrey Faber was a four-star hooper at Dowling Catholic who would go on to become a three-time All-Big East selection at Creighton. One February afternoon, when Faber needed to appear at The Des Moines Register office as part of the paper’s all-area team, 13-year-old Clark tagged along.

John Naughton covered high school sports for The Register for 31 years until his retirement in 2019. Naughton said hello to Faber and then motioned to Clark.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“I’m Caitlin Clark, Audrey’s my cousin,” she answered.

“Maybe I’ll write about you someday,’” Naughton responded.

On Nov. 22, 2016, Clark played her first game as a freshman at Dowling Catholic High. She scored a team-high 14 points, grabbed six rebounds, dished five assists, pulled three steals and had one turnover in a 75-26 win. Two months later, on Jan. 25, 2017, The Des Moines Register introduced Clark to its readership with a photo and quote from Clark following her 21-point game in a win against Des Moines Roosevelt.

A day later, Naughton included a section on Clark in his girls basketball notebook. He wrote, “Got my first chance to watch West Des Moines Dowling Catholic freshman Caitlin Clark play Tuesday. She’s the real deal.”

Clark scored 368 points that season and led her team to the state tournament, where she scored 11 points in an 87-64 loss to crosstown rival West Des Moines Valley. The game was streamed by the Central Iowa Sports Network. It was the first of Clark’s games aired live to a wide audience.

Clark led the state in scoring as a senior (775 points) and junior (781), but she never won a state title. Her senior year ended with a four-point loss in a regional final. Clark scored 40 points and grabbed 10 rebounds. It wasn’t a state tournament game, so it wasn’t televised.

The COVID-19 pandemic eliminated crowds during the 2020-21 college basketball season, which made it seem like Clark played her freshman season at Iowa in obscurity.

Her first college game came on Nov. 25, 2020, against Northern Iowa, and aired on BTN-Plus, a pay-per-view stream. She scored 27 points in 26 minutes in front of an announced attendance of 365.

Clark’s first nine games were streamed on BTN-Plus. Her first televised contest took place Jan. 9, 2021, at Northwestern. BTN’s Lisa Byington and Meghan McKeown called the action. It was the first of nine of Clark’s games to air on BTN that season.

Fox executives started to notice that Clark’s games drew about 30 percent more viewers than the other games it aired on BTN.

The 2021 NCAA Tournament took place in the San Antonio bubble. In the Sweet 16, Iowa faced UConn, which featured fellow freshman Paige Bueckers. ABC aired the clash, the first time in 16 years an over-the-air network televised an NCAA women’s tournament game. UConn won 92-72 in a game that drew 1.5 million viewers, the most of the six games ABC aired that tournament.

In her sophomore season, Clark’s Iowa telecasts on BTN were 98 percent higher than other women’s games. By her junior year, Clark had fully smashed the chicken or egg dilemma that Stiff ran up against when trying to get good slots for women’s basketball games at ESPN. Clark was must-see TV, with 12 games airing on either ABC, Fox or ESPN, up from five combined in her first two seasons. The Hawkeyes broke BTN’s ratings record four different times, and the Iowa-LSU championship game on ABC generated 9.9 million viewers.

For Clark’s final season, nine Iowa games aired on either ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox, and every Big Ten game was available on network television or Peacock streaming. Clark’s games set women’s basketball viewership records on eight different television or streaming platforms.

The BTN’s Maryott, who oversees nearly all of the network’s live sports except football and men’s basketball, saw the impact Clark had in the viewership numbers, but she also experienced it anecdotally. Her 84-year-old mother, Jean, briefly was in a nursing home last winter for cardiac rehab.

“I’m calling to check on her, and she’s like, ‘Oh, honey, I’ve got to go. We’ve got pizza being delivered to the nursing home and we’re watching Caitlin tonight,’” Maryott said.

Her mother had never paid attention to sports until Clark came to Iowa.

Fox began to look for successes outside of Iowa and Clark. Last Thanksgiving, following its Lions-Packers’ 12:30 p.m. game, Fox aired a men’s college game that drew 5 million viewers and then a women’s game — Indiana and Tennessee — that drew 1.18 million. It was a new record for a women’s basketball game on that network.

Clark played on BTN 43 times during her four years at Iowa, counting the Crossover at Kinnick exhibition in which the school set the women’s basketball single-game attendance record (55,646). Her final appearance was a win over Michigan in a 2024 Big Ten tournament semifinal. Clark came out of a postgame interview session and saw Maryott in the hallway.

“I’ll see you guys tomorrow,’” she said.

Maryott corrected Clark. Her game the next day would air on CBS.

“Then her face kind of fell,” Maryott recalled. “I said, ‘Caitlin, it’s been a thrill. Thank you.’ And she grabs me and hugs me and hugs Meghan, and she says, ‘Thank you guys for everything you did.’ That hit me so hard, because I’m thinking, ‘Thank you for what you did.’”

Caitlin Clark after being selected No. 1 overall by the Indiana Fever in the 2024 WNBA Draft. ((Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

Viewers followed Clark into the WNBA this season. Her regular-season games were watched by 1.178 million viewers compared to 401,000 for all other non-Clark WNBA games, a 199 percent difference. While she is definitely the main attraction, the league over the last five years under commissioner Cathy Englebert has increased the number of nationally televised games from 80 to 200.

“It was the confluence of all this coming together at the same time,” Englebert said.

The WNBA receives $200 million per season in the NBA’s new television contract with ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. The WNBA was previously taking in around $65 million per season. There are budding stars and rivalries, with Englebert citing Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink and the next generation emerging in college, including UConn’s Bueckers and USC’s JuJu Watkins.

“You are looking at the solid next decade of real stars in this league,” Engelbert said. She added: “Whenever anyone asks me, ‘What is next? Expansion? Check. Media? Check. Globalization of this game.”

In 2021, Stiff retired from ESPN during a round of layoffs. She was honored by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and won the John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award. Her reach extended beyond basketball; she was instrumental in the expansion of softball coverage at ESPN.

She was among the millions who watched Clark and Iowa versus LSU in the title game on ABC, and she was pleased with the attention it received, but she also wondered what the number would have been if it had aired in prime time rather than on a Sunday afternoon.

In an email to his staff after the game, ESPN president of content Burke Magnus mentioned Stiff and former top ESPN producer Pat Lowry, another women’s hoops advocate.

“While the future is bright, I thought a lot about the many contributors like Pat Lowry and Carol Stiff, who worked tirelessly for decades to build up women’s basketball slowly but surely,” Magnus wrote. “Everything we witnessed in Cleveland would not have been possible without their efforts.”

ESPN’s chairman Jimmy Pitaro and Disney CEO Bob Iger followed that up with text messages to Stiff, thanking her for her advocacy through the years.

Stiff, now the president of the Women’s Sports Network, played a role in helping broker a game between UConn and the University of Southern California for Dec. 21, with Bueckers and Watkins stepping in as the must-see stars.

That game, played in the 16,000-capacity XL Center in Hartford, will be shown on Fox right after a special Saturday NFL matchup between the rival Steelers and Ravens.

“Clearly, we want to capitalize on the momentum behind women’s basketball and help establish new stars post-Caitlin,” Mulvihill said.

That had long been Stiff’s dream, to see what would happen if a women’s game got a prime slot and lead-in like that.

Said Stiff: “It’s going to be a fabulous game.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Elsa, Mike Powell, Damian Strohmeyer, Nathaniel S. Butler, Daniel, Andy Lyons / Getty Images)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — 23XI Racing co-owners Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin started off NASCAR championship week by facing the sanctioning body in federal court.

23XI, which along with Front Row Motorsports is suing NASCAR and its CEO Jim France for antitrust violations, had its first in-person courtroom showdown with NASCAR during a Monday hearing over a preliminary injunction request.

On the fifth floor of the federal courthouse in Charlotte, the teams’ attorney, Jeffrey Kessler, sparred with NASCAR attorney Chris Yates in a spirited, sometimes contentious hearing. At stake is a clause in NASCAR’s 2025 charter agreement with teams that does not permit them to bring legal action; 23XI and FRM asked Judge Frank Whitney to waive that clause and allow them to sign the agreements so they can continue racing, either as charter teams or non-charter “open” teams.

“We literally cannot practice our profession at all without signing this release,” Kessler said.

23XI Racing co-owners Michael Jordan, Denny Hamlin and Curtis Polk, and Front Row Motorsports’ Bob Jenkins and Jerry Freeze walk into a federal courthouse for today’s injunction hearing. pic.twitter.com/hXNJaecFFW

— Jordan Bianchi (@Jordan_Bianchi) November 4, 2024

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The teams hope Whitney will both waive the clause and reinstate the original charter offer NASCAR had on the table Sept. 6, when 13 owners signed it. The DocuSign originally had a deadline of Nov. 5, Kessler said, but NASCAR has now withdrawn it.

Yates said NASCAR no longer wants to enter into a charter agreement with the teams after they have disparaged NASCAR publicly.

“They have been calling NASCAR a series of names that undermine NASCAR’s brand and goodwill,” Yates said. “NASCAR only wants to enter into charter agreements with teams who want to work collectively to grow the sport.”

Yates added the teams have made a “frontal assault on the charter system” and argued NASCAR is not a monopoly for several reasons, including the availability of 128 other tracks on which stock cars could race in the United States aside from the 26 Cup Series venues.

He also said the owners could choose to do something else with their business aside from running a NASCAR team, such as “buying another NBA team,” a nod to Jordan’s former ownership of the Charlotte Hornets. But Kessler said the suggestion 23XI and FRM could suddenly change their business model, even to another racing series, would be like asking a football player to become a baseball player.

Jordan spent much of Yates’ arguments leaning forward intently from his seat in the front row of the courtroom, sometimes with a smirk and other times holding his chin.

Michael Jordan after the hearing: pic.twitter.com/2L4MQFmsxj

— Jeff Gluck (@jeff_gluck) November 4, 2024

Yates said under the 2025 charter agreement, race teams will receive approximately half of all TV revenues and said the worst-performing charter team would get a 50 percent increase in payouts from the current agreement.

He said NASCAR was contractually obligated to inform teams of the purse money for next season by Nov. 1, which is why NASCAR has reduced the number to 32 charters with no plans to re-offer 23XI and FRM their existing four combined charters. Charters offer guaranteed entry into each Cup Series race, along with a higher share of the race winnings. Yates claimed the teams were asking the judge to force NASCAR into a seven-to-14-year agreement by rewriting the contract “on their preferred terms.”

“They’re trying to force NASCAR into an unwanted charter relationship,” he said.

Kessler denied that and said the teams only wanted the judge to waive the clause for the length of this case, adding: “Hopefully it doesn’t take 14 years.”

Yates also said the teams’ contention that many owners were coerced into signing the new agreement on Sept. 6 was false, because team owners like Roger Penske, Rick Hendrick and Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs are not the type of people who get pushed around. He also quoted Hendrick and owner Justin Marks as saying they were pleased with the terms of the new charter agreement.

At one point, Kessler loudly said Yates was “manufacturing facts” and “misrepresenting” the teams’ case to mislead the judge. Kessler rephrased the terms of what the teams were asking for “so even (Yates) can understand it.”

GO DEEPER

Michael Jordan confident in outcome of lawsuit against NASCAR

Responded Yates: “We disagree on pretty much everything he’s argued.”

Kessler also revealed 23XI’s driver contract with Tyler Reddick would allow the driver to leave as a free agent if 23XI did not have a charter for him, along with the team’s sponsors.

Reddick is one of four drivers competing for the NASCAR Cup Series championship on Sunday at Phoenix Raceway. Prior to the hearing, Whitney told those in the room he hadn’t seen his courtroom so full “in several years” and added, “I feel like I have two full law firms in front of me, too.”

Whitney initially appeared skeptical of Kessler’s claims while being more open to Yates’ arguments, but the rebuttals from Kessler left the two sides on even ground.

The judge praised both attorneys for their “extraordinary” and “very excellent arguments” and said he would give a written decision by Friday.

Both sides appeared pleased afterward. Though NASCAR did not comment, France turned around and winked at senior advisor Mike Helton in the row behind him.

And Jordan, addressing reporters outside the courtroom, said Kessler “did an unbelievable job today.”

“I put all my cards on the table,” Jordan said. “I think we did a good job of that. But I’m looking forward to winning the championship this weekend.”

Required reading

(Photo: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)