Denny Hamlin: NASCAR needs to change ‘mindset’ to get ‘remotely close’ to settlement
Denny Hamlin said Thursday that he hopes a resolution will come out of the judicial settlement conference that is set for next week.
But the NASCAR Cup Series driver and co-owner of Cup team 23XI Racing also indicated that such a resolution is unlikely.
“I hope so,” Hamlin told The Charlotte Observer, when asked if the settlement conference could yield an early resolution. “I think that realistically, they are going to have to change their thinking when it comes to settlement for us to get remotely close.”
Hamlin said this mere days before NASCAR and plaintiffs 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports are set to meet at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday before District Judge Kenneth D. Bell. The hearing will take place in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina in Charlotte.
The judicial settlement conference will be the latest milestone in a lawsuit that began all the way back in October 2024, when Cup teams 23XI Racing — owned by Hamlin and sports icon Michael Jordan — and Front Row Motorsports sued NASCAR on that grounds that the stock car sanctioning body was a monopoly.
The legal battle has trudged on for a year and has been acrimonious at times. It has also included previous attempts at mediation to no avail — specifically via efforts with private mediator Jeffrey Mishkin, the former executive vice president and chief legal officer of the NBA.
A trial is set for December if the suit is not settled before then.
When asked specifically what he was referring to when he said “change their thinking,” Hamlin said that NASCAR has “stated publicly that they don’t know what we want.”
“And that’s untrue,” said Hamlin, who spoke with The Observer after a speaking engagement at the Hood Hargett Breakfast Club on Thursday morning. “They absolutely do. But they’re going to have to change their mindset if we’re going to end this thing.”
Cup Series teams submit filing Wednesday evening
The Cup Series teams in litigation with NASCAR filed a memorandum of law in opposition to NASCAR’s motion for summary judgment the night before Hamlin offered this insight to The Observer.
The teams’ various Wednesday filings claim that NASCAR’s motion is “a meandering combination of mischaracterizations of plaintiffs’ claims, misstatements of governing antitrust law and disputed facts which must go to trial.”
To quote the material further:
“Right off the bat, NASCAR wrongly claims that plaintiffs are seeking to have the charter system declared an antitrust violation when it knows that this is the opposite of what plaintiffs have claimed,” the teams wrote. “As this court is well aware, plaintiffs have consistently maintained that it is not economically viable to race in NASCAR under current conditions without a charter, and Plaintiffs have previously sought to make the charters permanent assets, not to have them eliminated.”
The teams cited the throngs of statements that team owners and other high-profile NASCAR names made earlier this month — statements that were published in a NASCAR filing. Those statements essentially said that the teams and NASCAR must resolve their litigation with the charter system intact. The charter system, after all, ensures that Cup Series teams have guaranteed entry into every race, a guaranteed portion of each race’s purse and a cut of the league’s media revenue, among other benefits.
Rick Hendrick, owner of the winningest Cup Series team in NASCAR history, specifically stated in the aforementioned NASCAR filing: “I believe the potential loss of Charters … represents an existential threat to Hendrick Motorsports and other Cup Series race teams. It would jeopardize our business and risk the jobs of thousands of people who rely on our industry.”
“Plaintiffs agree with the teams who submitted declarations stating that the charter system has been essential for their survival,” the teams wrote Wednesday. “And none of the team declarations provide any support for NASCAR’s summary judgment motion.”
NASCAR contends this is a business negotiation tactic through litigation
The teams then went on to refute NASCAR’s motion for summary judgment, touching on many of the reasons why they initially asserted that NASCAR is a monopoly.
Those reasons, according to court documents, include (1) that there is no alternative for Cup teams to race in what the teams call “premier stock-car events”; (2) that Cup teams can’t run the Next Gen car anywhere else; and (3) that NASCAR pays Cup teams below their market value — which, the teams contend, is true in for the terms of the 2025 charter agreement and “the even worse ‘open’ agreement terms.”
NASCAR declined to comment for this story. But the sanctioning body has contended throughout the legal battle that the teams are engaging in a business negotiation through litigation — and are threatening the state of the charter system, and thus the economic viability of the sport, in the process.
“Neither greed nor an individual’s bruised ego over his inability to deliver on some promises he made to other teams justifies trying to destroy an institution,” NASCAR stated in its Oct. 3 filing, referencing Jordan’s business manager Curtis Polk, who led the teams’ negotiations for terms of the 2025 charter.
This story was originally published October 16, 2025 at 4:32 PM with the headline "Denny Hamlin: NASCAR needs to change ‘mindset’ to get ‘remotely close’ to settlement."
