Who Owns NASCAR: One Family, Privately

NASCAR is owned by one family, privately, and has been for its whole history. Jim France is chairman and chief executive.

That single fact explains almost everything about the sport’s economics — and it is why two teams took the sanctioning body to federal court.

Owner	The France family, privately held
Chairman and CEO	Jim France
Paid to the France family trust, 2021–2024	more than $400m
Teams’ status	Licensees, not owners of the sport

The structural difference

In the NFL, NBA and MLB, the league is a body constituted by the team owners. The owners collectively are the league; the commissioner works for them.

NASCAR is the reverse. The sanctioning body is a private family company, and the teams hold charters — the right to a place in every Cup Series race and the revenue attached to it. The teams are licensees of a business someone else owns.

Set that against the club model documented in our guide to Premier League owners, or against the Dallas Cowboys, an individually owned franchise inside an owner-run league, covered in who owns the Dallas Cowboys. NASCAR belongs to neither pattern.

The lawsuit

In October 2024, 23XI Racing — co-owned by Michael Jordan — and Front Row Motorsports, owned by the fast-food franchisee Bob Jenkins, filed a federal antitrust suit against NASCAR and Jim France.

Their allegations concerned exclusive track agreements, control over parts suppliers and restrictive charter terms. The case also brought into public view that the France family trust was paid more than $400 million between 2021 and 2024 — the kind of figure a private company would not otherwise publish.

Those claims were never tested to a verdict. The case settled, and settlement is not a finding.

How it ended, and what changed

The France family settled on the ninth day of the trial.

The substantive outcome: charters became evergreen, with terms renegotiated at each new media rights deal. The case was dismissed once 23XI and Front Row signed the new charter agreement.

That is a real change, and it is worth being precise about why. A fixed-term charter is a licence that can lapse — hard to borrow against, hard to sell at full value, and it leaves a team negotiating from weakness each time it comes up. An evergreen charter is much closer to a franchise: a durable, financeable asset.

The teams did not win ownership of the sport. They won a better lease on it.

NASCAR entered its 78th season in 2026 with that structure in place.

The two motorsport series nobody’s competitors own

Motorsport is unusual in that its two biggest series are assets held by people who do not race in them.

Series	Owner	Type
NASCAR	The France family	Private family company
Formula 1	Liberty Media	Listed corporation

Liberty Media bought Formula 1 for around $8 billion in 2017, against a valuation now estimated near $22 billion, as our guide to who owns Formula 1 sets out. Both series sell the championship; the competitors buy access to it.

The difference is disclosure. Liberty Media is publicly listed, so its Formula One Group financials are published as a matter of law. NASCAR’s became visible through a lawsuit.

That is the same transparency divide we found between American college football, where public-university contracts are disclosable, and professional football, where no club discloses manager pay — covered in our guide to the highest paid college football coaches.

Why one family still owns it

Because nobody ever sold it. NASCAR was founded as a private business and remained one while every other major American sport professionalised into an owners’ league or a listed company.

The consequence is a sanctioning body that sets the rules, negotiates the media rights, and — through related family interests — has held significant track ownership. Concentration of that kind is unusual in modern sport, and it is what the antitrust claim was aimed at.

The settlement adjusted the terms. It did not change who owns the sport.

How we checked these numbers

NASCAR’s private ownership by the France family, Jim France’s role as chairman and chief executive, and the more than $400 million paid to the France family trust between 2021 and 2024 are from Fox Sports’ explainer on the antitrust case. The October 2024 filing by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports, Michael Jordan’s co-ownership of 23XI and Bob Jenkins’ ownership of Front Row are from Business Wire’s announcement and CBS Sports’ coverage. The allegations regarding exclusive track agreements, parts suppliers and charter terms, the settlement on the ninth day of trial, the move to evergreen charters renegotiated at each media rights deal, and the dismissal on signing are from Yahoo Sports and Spectrum News, which also reports the 2026 season as NASCAR’s 78th.

The allegations described here are allegations. The case settled before judgment and was dismissed, so no court found them proven, and this page should not be read as saying otherwise.

Review class: event-driven. Recheck on any change to the charter agreement, any new media rights deal, or any further litigation.