Jordan's 23XI suit pushed dinosaurs out, NASCAR into the future - ESPN

Years ago, I was in the garage at Darlington Raceway chatting with David Pearson, Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough. All three are among the greatest racers in NASCAR history. All three had long since retired as drivers, but all three had only recently given up trying to be Cup Series team owners, the experience having crushed them all financially.

Yaborough said to me, «You are looking at three NASCAR dinosaurs.»

Pearson laughed and replied, «But we're doing better than the dinosaurs because we're still here.»

When I asked them what they'd figured out that the dinosaurs didn't, Allison explained, «We were smart enough to realize we were dinosaurs and got out of the damn way before we went extinct.»

On Thursday afternoon in a Charlotte courthouse, another NASCAR dinosaur got out of the damn way.

As an antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR, filed by 23XI Racing, co-owned by Michael Jordan and three-time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin, and Front Row Motorsports (FRM), began to grind its way toward the end of its second week, the two sides announced that they had reached a settlement.

As the finer details of the agreement were still being revealed into late afternoon, there was no doubt that the victory belonged to the teams over the sanctioning body because we already knew that their ultimate goal had been achieved. In the end, this was about their fight for NASCAR to make team charters, as close as stock car racing gets to stick-and-ball franchises, permanent — or as their attorney Jeffrey Kessler described it, «evergreen» — as opposed to a contract-to-contract model, renewed in conjunction with NASCAR's massive media rights deals.

It is very difficult to find someone in the Cup Series paddock who does not believe this is the