UPDATE: NASCAR President Steve Phelps commented on the charter renewal at Friday’s State of the Sport Press conference:
“I’m not going to get into the negotiations, but I will give you kind of where we are to the degree that I can without getting into too much specificity.
If you would ask the race teams do we think we’re making progress with NASCAR on where things stand in the extension of our charters, I think our race teams would say yes.
We understand that race teams want three things. I’ll talk about charters specifically or Cup specifically. Honestly, it’s the same thing for Xfinity and Trucks.
If you think about race teams, what do they want? They want to be competitive on the racetrack, they want to make sure they’re break-even or profitable. As it relates to the charter specifically, they want to increase their enterprise value.
I won’t get into numbers where we stand from an enterprise value standpoint, but when the charters change hands at the end of the year, we know at least one will, there will be a significant multiple that race teams will have from a charter enterprise value standpoint.”
AND asked for more details, he responded:
“I think the first thing we need to do is get through our media rights. I think the race teams have seen that.
With that said, we’re currently having discussions with our race teams. We had a meeting last Wednesday with a team owner council where the entirety of the meeting was about charters, charter extensions.
We’ve acknowledged that we want to change the paradigm for our race teams and we need to make sure our race teams are profitable, competing on the racetracks. We are interested in having their enterprise value climb, as I said earlier.
No timeline, but we are as we’re finalizing our media rights talking about other portions of what our charters would look like that are not financial.”
— NASCAR —
ORIGINAL POST: NASCAR attempted to assuage concerns over its charter offer to teams last week, and some teams came away from the meeting feeling more encouraged about the prospects of a deal, sources said. The meeting was the quarterly Team Owner Council gathering that was first established when the initial charter system was founded in 2015 as a way to give teams greater governance of the sport.
NASCAR and its premier series teams are still unlikely to finalize a complete agreement until after NASCAR strikes its next media rights deals, sources say, a tactical battle that NASCAR has won. It remains a point of frustration for teams because they originally went public with their discontent in 2022 over the current state of the owner model in a bid to jumpstart talks. The term for the new media rights deals isn’t until 2025; it’s not yet clear when NASCAR will have those deals done by, but it could be by late this year.
Nonetheless, sources say that at the quarterly team owner council meeting last week, NASCAR President Steve Phelps gave greater clarity on NASCAR’s current offer to teams including how the sport intends to divvy up the financial split between the 36 charters, which are NASCAR’s version of franchising. Teams do not own the sanctioning body itself, or any part of it, a key difference from stick-and-ball leagues.
See much more at Sports Business Journal.