Today, the anti-trust lawsuit against NASCAR—filed by two unhappy teams, one of them led by basketball legend Michael Jordan—entered its ninth day and yielded a surprise settlement, the precise details of which have not been disclosed. Everybody, however, seemed happy on the steps of the courthouse in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the warring parties did everything but link arms and softly sing Kumbaya. Whether they’re happy because they won, or just happy it’s over, remains to be seen. Up to this point, it has been a contentious and uncomfortable battle, with lifelong friendships threatened as bombshell testimony piled up.

What was exposed over the course of the last week, and the settlement itself, were completely unexpected. The sport has been eviscerated as fans pick through the pieces online, and besides the revelation that all NASCAR charters will be permanent from now on, it’s not clear what the future holds for NASCAR. It’s not how the sport’s pioneers, Florida’s France family, mentally mapped the rolling trajectory of NASCAR, which was founded by family patriarch and Daytona Beach gas station owner “Big Bill” France, who stood 6 feet, 5 inches.

He conceived, created, and ran NASCAR. Seventy-seven years later, the France family still runs NASCAR. Jim France, the 81-year-old chairman and CEO and the son of Big Bill, owns 54 percent of NASCAR, and was specifically named in the suit. His niece, Lesa France Kennedy, the 64-year-old daughter of Bill France, Jr. and executive vice-chair of NASCAR, owns 46 percent.

Exactly what NASCAR is worth would be a guess, but the media keeps referring to a 2023 analysis by Goldman Sachs that valued it at $5 billion.

Jim France and Lesa France Kennedy are notoriously private people, visibly uncomfortable when required to speak publicly, as Jim did today as the settlement was announced. Both are also notoriously loyal to their friends.

I’ve been doing this for a while, and I’ll tell you some things you won’t read anywhere else about Jim and Lesa. First, a bit about the Frances that came before them.

In 1947, Big Bill began hosting meetings at the Ebony Bar atop the art-deco Streamline Hotel in Daytona to discuss the formation of a legit racing series for stock cars. Drivers competing at small tracks across the south were being victimized by crooked promoters, who would advertise races with big purses to attract cars and a crowd. At best, the promoter might pay out pennies on the promised dollars. At worst, he would disappear with the proceedings before the checkered flag flew.

There existed a few small sanctioning bodies, but France and friends envisioned something larger and more ambitious. They would call it the National Association for Stock Car Racing. NASCAR was officially formed on February 21, 1948. Then everybody had a drink.

NASCAR sanctioned some races for modified cars in 1948, but the template for what we know as NASCAR today was created in June of 1949 with a race in Charlotte, North Carolina, featuring “stock” cars, essentially vehicles straight from the showroom. France noted that fans liked to see cars like the ones they drove compete on the racetrack, and that trajectory was set. The Fords, Toyotas, and Chevrolets in NASCAR Cup racing are still supposed to look like Mustangs, Camrys, and Camaros, though Chevy hasn’t built a single new Camaro since 2023.

Big Bill ruled NASCAR with a firm hand, one that occasionally clutched a revolver when he needed to make a point. He retired in 1972, passing the torch to his son, the comparably imposing Bill France, Jr., who inherited his father’s ability to make other large men feel small.

Big Bill died 20 years later, from Alzheimer’s. He was 82.

The tenure of Bill France, Jr., would be rich and melodramatic. A year before he assumed control of NASCAR, the series cut a deal with R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which had millions to spend, as the federal government was getting tough on tobacco advertising. The top NASCAR class was renamed Winston Cup, and things just went from there.

Eventually, that tenure of Bill Jr. would also be ironic: A longtime smoker, he died of lung cancer.

Under Bill Jr. and Winston, NASCAR began a steady growth that continued until 1979, the year CBS aired the Daytona 500 live. A snowstorm in the northeast kept people home, and a great many tuned into the race. As you likely know, Richard Petty won, but only after leaders Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough crashed into the infield. They were soon joined by Donnie’s brother Bobby, and punches were thrown, viewed live and up close, on CBS. Ratings were huge. NASCAR exploded, in a good way. Everything was great until Dale Earnhardt was killed in the 2001 Daytona 500. NASCAR found out what it would take to get a race driver on the cover of Time magazine.

An ailing Bill Jr. made his son Brian, then 41, the chairman and CEO of NASCAR in 2003. Brian’s time at the wheel was uneven: Unlike his father and grandfather, he never seemed to embrace motorsports, and he didn’t possess their ability to make things happen by sheer will.

Brian did, though, bring NASCAR into the modern age. He welcomed Toyota into NASCAR Cup racing, controversial at the time but prescient. He introduced the “Chase for the Championship” in 2004, which changed the way the season champion was selected. He engineered a hugely lucrative, long-term TV deal.

But Brian didn’t resonate with fans or drivers or team owners the way his father and grandfather did. He seemed to prefer life in Los Angeles or New York City more than little Daytona Beach, and even worse, he didn’t appear to genuinely enjoy racing, and attended less than half the Cup events. There were rumors that he was thinking about moving on.

And then, in August of 2018, on a weekend when NASCAR was racing in Watkins Glen, New York, that decision was made for him. Brian was arrested 250 miles away in Sag Harbor, New York, for DUI. He took an “indefinite leave of absence,” which soon became quite definite.

There were no other young Frances, especially sizable males, prepared to step in and take over. Well, maybe one: Jim France has a son, J.C., that was appropriately sized—he stood 6 feet, 2 inches, was a Junior Olympics weightlifter and had played semipro football—but he really wasn’t cut out for the boardroom. What J.C. wanted to do was race sports cars, and he did, driving for Brumos, the legendary Florida Porsche dealer. Much of J.C.’s racing was as a co-driver for Hurley Haywood, America’s greatest endurance racer, who won the Rolex 24 overall five times and the 24 Hours of Le Mans three times.

In 2004, Haywood told me that J.C., then 38, “stepped into what could have been a very difficult, no-win situation. People may think he’s a spoiled rich kid, but he’s not. He’s a great guy.” J.C. still races historic sports cars, including multiple drives at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England.

Said J.C. about his experience working in the family business: “I’ve done everything from paint bathrooms and mow the grass to work in the photography department and in accounting and operations, and then in the NASCAR marketing department.” But to run the whole show? You’ve got the wrong guy.

So, suddenly, Jim France, son of Big Bill but 11 years younger than his brother, Bill Jr., became the reluctant chairman and CEO of NASCAR, replacing his nephew, Brian.

It was not a job he sought.

Jim went to work for his father when he was 14, graduated from high school in Daytona, and then from college with a business degree in 1968, followed by a stint in the U.S. Army, in Vietnam. On his return, Jim gravitated not to NASCAR but to its sister company, the International Speedway Corporation, which was founded in 1953 by Big Bill to handle the very ambitious construction of Daytona International Speedway. But the publicly-traded ISC (NASCAR itself has always been private) lived long after Daytona opened in 1959, handling the construction of the even-bigger Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, which opened in 1969.

After that, ISC began acquiring tracks, including Darlington Raceway, NASCAR’s oldest oval track; four speedways that had been owned by Roger Penske, plus building tracks, like Kansas Speedway, a project spearheaded by Lesa. At one point, ISC owned 17 tracks, and the majority of them hosted NASCAR events. Most of the non-ISC tracks used by NASCAR are owned by Speedway Motorsports, which owns 11 tracks, including Charlotte Motor Speedway and Texas Motor Speedway.

Jim is undeniably a fan of NASCAR’s mostly oval-track racing, but his passion has long been road racing. He formed the Grand American Road Racing Association in 1999, with the series’ anchor race being the most important sports car event in America, the Rolex 24 at Daytona. Grand-Am was battling the Georgia-based American Le Mans Series, founded by Dr. Don Panoz, the deep-pocketed creator of the nicotine patch. Eventually, both men agreed that America isn’t big enough for two competing series, so France bought the ALMS for a rumored $37 million, and merged the two into what is now the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

Jim’s niece, Bill Jr.’s daughter Lesa, also seemed to prefer ISC, which she joined in 1983, right out of college. Her march to the top was built on performance; she became ISC’s president in 2003, and CEO in 2009, the year Forbes magazine named her “the most powerful woman in sports.”
In 2019, NASCAR—which was then as it is now, pretty much Jim France and Lesa France Kennedy—voted to buy up ISC’s stock and merge it into NASCAR.

I had met Jim France before, but I got to know him a little in January of 2008 at a reception at Richard Childress Racing in North Carolina. RCR had, and still has, a NASCAR team, but that evening it was announced that Childress would field a Pontiac-powered Crawford prototype sports car in France’s Grand-Am sports car series. It was a short-lived effort.

After the presentation, it was time for wine from Childress’ own vineyard, and spirited conversation, something I’m not very good at. Neither is Jim France. I spotted him standing against a wall, by himself, waiting for this to be over. I decided to walk over and introduce myself. What’s the worst that can happen? Well, his security detail might materialize and drag me away, but I took the chance.

And nothing happened. We shook hands and had a congenial conversation. About racing, about motorcycles, about life. Might he be willing to sit for a one-on-one interview after we got back to Florida? Yes, he said, and I was bowled over: He never does that. Not then, not now.

We did several interviews. I’d go to his office, which is several miles from NASCAR headquarters; I’d do an interview, then we’d walk next door to a convenient restaurant. I asked, “Do you own this place?” He just smiled. Over the years I’d see him at NASCAR races, at sportscar races, at New Smyrna Speedway, a Saturday-night short track. He always had time to talk.

Once I saw him having breakfast at a restaurant across the street from the Daytona speedway: I was with John Doonan, France’s handpicked head of the IMSA series, and France was with one of his best friends, Gary Nelson, the Rolex 24-winning crew chief for an IMSA GTP Cadillac in this life; in a previous life, Nelson was Bobby Allison’s crew chief for his 1983 championship-winning NASCAR Cup car, and after that he worked for NASCAR, directing the safety initiative that occurred after the death of Dale Earnhardt in February, 2001.

I wrote a magazine story about Nelson, and I asked him if he’d seen it. “You know, I did, and I took it into Waffle House, opened it up to the story, and laid it down on the counter, and they still charged me for my cup of coffee.” Yes, well.

Nelson and France bonded largely over their love of motorcycle riding. One of France’s close friends was S. Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A, an avid motorcycle rider and collector. Cathy died in 2014.

Jim France also liked to drive race cars, winning a season championship in a Legends car series that competed mostly on oval tracks. I asked him why, since he was so taken with road racing, he raced in an oval track series? “Well,” he said, “If I’m driving a 10-lap race on a 15-turn road course, I have to learn 150 corners. On an oval track, I just have to remember four.”

My introduction to Lesa France Kennedy was a much sadder affair. She was married to Dr. Bruce Kennedy, an accomplished plastic surgeon, and a nice guy. They had one son, Ben.

On July 10, 2007, a Tuesday, the family was planning to leave the next day to go on a summer vacation. Dr. Kennedy, who loved to fly and held a commercial pilot’s license, took off from the Daytona Beach airport at about 8:30 a.m. for a round trip to Lakeland, an easy hourlong flight. He was accompanied by senior NASCAR pilot Michael Klemm, who had over 10,000 hours of flight time. They were in a twin-engine Cessna 310R, the smallest and slowest of nine airplanes in NASCAR’s corporate aviation division.

Ten minutes into the flight, one of the pilots, we don’t know which one, declared an emergency on the radio, reporting smoke in the cockpit. He asked to land at nearby Orlando Sanford International Airport, and said they were turning off everything electrical. They were cleared to land on any runway at the airport, but it’s doubtful they heard that.

Witnesses reported that smoke was trailing the Cessna as it descended, fast. About three miles short of the airport, the Cessna brushed some trees, clipped a house, crashed into two more houses, and caught fire. Both men aboard were killed, as were three people on the ground, and three more suffered serious burns.

In the National Transportation Safety Board’s 35-page report, the stated cause was an electrical fire under the plane’s instrument panel. Wiring on the 1977 plane was insulated with PVC—polyvinyl chloride—a substance that is no longer used for that. When PVC catches fire, it produces a thick, toxic smoke. There was evidence that one of the pilots had held the door open, likely trying to get the smoke out of the cockpit. It seems likely the pilots were either blinded by the smoke or losing consciousness when they crashed.

Especially confounding is that another NASCAR pilot flew the Cessna back from North Carolina the day before. An hour into that flight, the weather radar screen went blank, and the pilot smelled smoke. He pulled a circuit breaker, cutting power to the radar, and the burning smell went away. On arrival in Daytona, he wrote his experience up in the logbook and reported the issue to maintenance. The NTSB report said that nothing was done and criticized the decision to allow the plane to fly the next day.

It was horrible. Lesa and Ben mourned the best they could. It was a long road back.

Then, something remarkable happened. Prior to the crash, the Kennedys’ son Ben, had shown an interest in racing, and his father bought him a quarter-midget, and took him to a tiny oval track inside New Smyrna Speedway’s bigger half-mile track. The quarter-midget track was built with help from former NASCAR driver Mark Martin, to give his son, Matt, a place to race.

Though Dr. Kennedy was no mechanic, he’d do his best to adjust the chain, air up the tires, and change the spark plug and cheer on his only child.

Jim France spoke to Lesa: Do you think Ben might like to try to get back into racing? The answer was yes. Mark Martin got involved, and before long, Ben moved up to a full-sized Pro Truck series that used crate V-8 engines, then into a late model, then into the K&N touring series. They were working out of a shop Martin built for son Matt’s racing, but Matt preferred video games, Martin told me. So Mark and a small pit crew began helping Ben.

Several rungs of the ladder that Ben was climbing took place at Orlando Speedworld, a paved oval where I often raced. Lesa was always there with her son. I did an interview with Lesa and Ben—the first one they’d given after losing Bruce. I remember asking Ben one last question: Do you think your dad would be proud? Yes, he said. I think he would.

Ben began racing late models at the very fast New Smyrna Speedway’s banked oval. Occasionally I’d sit on the splintery wooden pit grandstands with Lesa, where I learned we had something in common: We both bit our nails, and were trying to quit. That wasn’t happening as she watched Ben race: One night, he crashed so hard one of his shoes came off. Lesa was inconsolable until she saw Ben climb from the car.

Ben managed to race and still earn his college degree, but he was faced with a decision: Keep racing, or join the family business? He chose racing, at least for a while, moving into the NASCAR truck series in 2013, then in 2017, into the Xfinity series, one step away from the NASCAR Cup series.

Ben was fast everywhere he went, but in January of 2018, he finally traded his fire suit for a business suit. There’s no denying that it had been a long time since a France had participated in NASCAR racing, which gave Ben—and Lesa as well—an up-close look at what it takes to race at a high level.

Ben is now 33, and he’s currently the NASCAR executive vice-president and chief venue and racing innovations officer. He is very well-regarded at work, still owns a late model team, and may be in line to succeed Jim as the head of NASCAR one day.

That’s assuming the France family continues to stand at the helm of the sport, which is more likely as a result of this settlement, but not a sure thing. That the dynasty has lasted this long is amazing; that NASCAR remains entirely in the hands of two members of the France family is astonishing. The battle with basketball legend Michael Jordan, NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin, and Jordan’s business partner Curtis Polk has been a bruiser to say the least.

They sought a bigger slice of the NASCAR pie for the three-car team they own, 23XI Racing. Almost a footnote is the fact that 23XI was joined in the suit by Front Row Racing, a plucky three-car team with drivers you have never heard of that belongs to Tennessee restaurateur Bob Jenkins, who owns some 250 fast-food restaurants. Jenkins testified that he has lost $100 million keeping Front Row afloat, so of course he wanted more money from NASCAR, too.

The suit was basically two-pronged: One was that 23XI and Front Row claim NASCAR is an illegal monopoly. Judge Kenneth Bell ruled before the trial even began that NASCAR is indeed a monopoly; plaintiff’s lawyers just have to prove that it’s an illegal one. The settlement seems to put that to rest.

The second prong was a little more complex. In 2016, NASCAR began the charter system. The teams, which were always categorized as independent contractors, long argued that even the best among them owned only their shop and soon-to-be obsolete race cars; they needed something from NASCAR to give them stability. Something they can sell, the way the NFL’s franchise system gives the Dallas Cowboys or Kansas City Chiefs value, should the owners ever put the teams on the market.

So NASCAR gave its full-time teams charters, one charter per car, up to a total of 36. Four-car teams got four charters, one-car teams got one. Each of the 36 chartered cars was guaranteed a spot in every race, no matter how slow they qualified. This means that their sponsors would never miss a race, and teams would know they will get a check after each race, with a base of about $185,000. NASCAR left four starting spots open, making for a field of 40, should a handful of unchartered teams show up.

In the decade the charter system has been in place, some teams have left, and others have arrived. Up until today, those new teams had two choices—they could either try to make it as one of the four unchartered cars, but that’s a precarious place to plant your flag. Or they could buy one (or two, or three) of the 36 charters from teams that are either downsizing or quitting altogether, thus guaranteeing a revenue stream from NASCAR, and that even the newest team’s car will be on TV for every race, which should impress sponsors.

Overnight, those “free” charters were worth more than $1 million apiece. And the price keeps climbing. Prior to the 2024 season, Spire Motorsports paid $40 million for Live Fast Motorsports’ charter.

Today, ESPN reported that NASCAR and Michael Jordan announced that the charters would now be permanent—a central point of contention between teams and NASCAR. NASCAR had reserved the right to review the charter allocation and revoke one or more charters if it chooses.

The charter deal that all but those two teams signed last year had been set to run through 2031, with an option for seven more years. Team owners wanted charters that can’t be revoked, period, which they believe would substantially increase the value of the charters. Any team wanting to race in the NASCAR Cup series would have to buy a charter from someone, and nobody knows what a permanent charter will cost, but it would be a lot more than $40 million.

We’re a long way from what Big Bill France envisioned, as he sat in the Ebony Bar in 1949, wondering where it would all lead.

Apparently, it led here. Is that a good thing, or a bad one? We’ll know the repercussions soon enough.

Ed. note: This story has been updated to reflect the outcome of today’s settlement.