The Hidden Payday Gap Between NASCAR and Formula 1

In the shadow of Charlotte’s gleaming skyscrapers, where the hum of high-performance engines is as common as the roar of rush-hour traffic, a legal storm was brewing. It was late November 2025, and the air in the federal courthouse crackled with tension.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

Michael Jordan, the six-time NBA champion whose name alone could fill arenas, sat stone-faced beside his co-owner, Denny Hamlin, a grizzled NASCAR veteran with a Daytona 500 trophy etched in his memory. Across the aisle, lawyers for NASCAR—the France family’s iron-fisted empire—flipped through binders thick as phone books. The antitrust lawsuit filed by Jordan’s 23XI Racing and Bob Jenkins’ Front Row Motorsports wasn’t just about charters or contracts; it was a reckoning for a sport built on speed but shackled by secrets.

The trigger? A flood of unsealed documents dumped into the public domain just days earlier, on November 22—thousands of pages of emails, texts, spreadsheets, and financial ledgers that laid bare the sanctioning body’s inner machinations. Among the revelations: vicious texts from top execs like Commissioner Steve Phelps plotting to “put a knife in this trash series” against the rival Superstar Racing Experience (SRX), calling it “trash” and fretting over stars like Hamlin moonlighting there. Phelps even texted about flogging veteran owner Richard Childress as a “bloody stupid redneck who made their fortune because of NASCAR,” an “idiot,” a “dinosaur and a pain in the arse — total bloody clown,” and urged that if owners disliked the system, they should “get rid of the charter and get the hell out of here.”

Words so inflammatory the judge barred them from trial, but not before they fueled whispers of corporate ruthlessness. At the heart of it all, though: the payouts. How the 36 chartered Cup Series teams divvied up the spoils from the $7.7 billion media rights deal that kicked off in 2025. And buried in Exhibit 21? A damning side-by-side with Formula 1, the global gladiator of motorsport, where teams feasted on prize pots that made NASCAR’s look like pocket change.

Denny Hamlin leaned back in his chair, his mind flashing back to a rainy afternoon in 2023. He’d just wrapped a strategy session at the 23XI shop in Mooresville, North Carolina, when his phone buzzed with a text from a source inside the sanctioning body. “Check this,” it read, followed by a leaked chart. Hamlin’s eyes widened. NASCAR’s total revenue had ballooned from $1.176 billion in 2016 to $1.701 billion in 2024, yet the teams’ cut hovered stubbornly at 19-21%—a measly $278.6 million annually across all 36 teams from 2016-2024, up just 28% from $218.2 million in the prior cycle. Now, under the new deal, the 2025 purse swelled to $431 million—up from $333 million in 2024—a projected average of $450.8 million yearly through 2031, a 62% jump overall. That shook out to about $7.7 million per team before performance bonuses, with the top dogs like Hendrick Motorsports or Joe Gibbs Racing scraping $18 million in a banner year, and mid-pack squads like Front Row lucky to clear $10 million. And that was before the bone-crushing costs: $2.2 million in losses per car, per the filings, thanks to skyrocketing parts from NASCAR-mandated single-source suppliers.

“They’re treating us like indentured servants,” Hamlin had confided earlier in the suit’s run-up, as he explained to reporters the raw deal teams faced. The Airness, ever the businessman, nodded slowly. He’d poured $150 million into 23XI since 2021, chasing the thrill of the draft and the dream of equity. But the numbers didn’t lie.

Despite those investments, 23XI turned a tidy $490,000 profit in 2021, ballooning to $2.53 million in 2022 and $3.53 million in 2023—numbers NASCAR lawyers now waved like a victory lap, even as the team shelled out $62,000 on a 2021 Christmas bash and $83,000 the next, per depositions. Charters—NASCAR’s version of franchises—guaranteed a starting spot and a base payout of $141,000 per race, plus a slice of the purse divided into fixed plans, performance metrics, and a year-end points fund. A 20th-place finish netted 2.479% of the purse, maybe $640,000 for a winner on a good day; the season champ’s owner hauled in $2.84 million from the points fund alone. Open teams? They clawed for scraps—$2.9 million for a full season if they hustled every race—while chartered outfits lounged at $11-12 million minimum.

The documents revealed more: NASCAR’s own execs, in a 2022 text chain, had mocked smaller teams as “on government welfare,” barely scraping by on the league’s dime. It reeked of monopoly, the plaintiffs argued—NASCAR owning 17 tracks, dictating car specs, and hoarding 79% of the revenue pie for itself, tracks, and executives, while averaging $340 million in profits in 2023-24 and bleeding $25 million on the Chicago street race alone.

But the real gut-punch came in Exhibit 21: the F1 benchmark. Across the Atlantic, Formula 1 wasn’t just racing; it was raining money. Liberty Media’s 2024 commercial revenue hit $3.65 billion, birthing a $1.266 billion prize pot for 2025—split 50-50 with commercial rights, then carved up generously. Ferrari, the prancing horse with veto power and heritage bonuses, pocketed a flat 5% ($63 million) just for showing up, plus another $63 million for past glories from the 20% historic pot ($253 million total). The rest? A sliding scale from the 75% standings-based fund ($949.5 million): 14% ($177 million) for champions like McLaren, tapering $9-12 million per spot down to 6% ($76 million) for 10th-place cellar-dwellers like Sauber.

Per team, it was obscene. Red Bull, Mercedes, and Ferrari hauled in $150-200 million annually from prizes alone, dwarfing even NASCAR’s elite; mid-tier squads like Alpine or Williams cleared $100-120 million, with backmarkers still netting $70-90 million—enough to fund R&D dreams without begging sponsors.

F1’s model funneled 37-62% of revenue back to teams, per the filings, versus NASCAR’s stingy 19-21%—barely half in raw terms. As former Haas F1 boss Guenther Steiner once put it on the stark budget realities across motorsports, even in F1’s cutthroat world, “the difference in budget between the teams has come down from hundreds of millions of dollars to mere tens of millions of dollars,” a far cry from NASCAR’s tighter margins where a single car’s losses could swallow a season.

“They’re barely half of what F1 dishes out,” one 23XI exec whispered in the courthouse hallway. No wonder Judge Kenneth Bell had barred “speculation” on F1 calcs at the November 12 hearing—he knew the optics were brutal.

Cut to Monaco, 2025. The F1 paddock glittered under Mediterranean sun, a far cry from NASCAR’s dusty ovals. Toto Wolff, Mercedes’ silver-arrow maestro, sipped espresso at a harborside café, his phone lighting up with the NASCAR news. Reflecting on F1’s booming financials amid his own stake sale that valued Mercedes at £4.6 billion, Wolff had marveled, “If someone would have told us five years ago what the valuations would be, we would have never believed it… We were able to increase the revenues and increase the free cash flows.” Across the pit lane, Haas F1’s Guenther Steiner—the gravel-voiced icon who’d jumped ship to consult—grinned at the irony. With his Haas days behind him, he’d savored the freedom, declaring, “I don’t need Gene Haas anymore,” a nod to escaping the budget battles that made even F1’s underdogs richer than NASCAR’s stars.

Back in Charlotte, the trial loomed like a black flag. Hamlin paced the 23XI garage, posters of his 2024 wins curling at the edges. The lawsuit wasn’t personal; it was survival. Front Row’s Bob Jenkins, a self-made broadcasting tycoon, had sunk his fortune into underdogs, only to watch open-team status gut their 2025 earnings. “Financially, it will be tough, for sure,” Jenkins had told reporters months earlier, emphasizing the need for viability. “It’s incumbent on the teams to help NASCAR grow the sport but it’s also incumbent on NASCAR to help teams be more viable.”

As the sun dipped over the Queen City, a leaked email surfaced: NASCAR’s Ben Kennedy admitting a $25 million bleed on the Chicago street race, yet execs greenlit it anyway. Fans erupted online—”Monopoly on wheels!”—while drivers like Kyle Busch, caught in the crossfire, stayed mum. The Drivers Advisory Council had filed an amicus brief, urging inclusion at the table. “We’re the ambassadors,” it read. “Don’t make us bargaining chips.”

In the end, as December 1 dawned, the story wasn’t about one lawsuit or one legend like Jordan. It was about two worlds colliding: NASCAR’s gritty, American grind, where a charter sold for $45 million but paid peanuts, versus F1’s champagne-soaked equity, where even losers left Vegas winners. Hamlin, ever the fighter, had summed it up best: “But until the jury trial staring December 1st… nobody knows what ’26 is going to look like. Sponsors don’t know, drivers don’t know, broadcasters don’t know. Because if the plaintiffs prevail, NASCAR is going to look very different.” Would the judge force a restructure, mandating 50% revenue shares like F1? Or would NASCAR dig in, texts and all? The checkered flag waved, but the real race—for fairness, for the future—had just begun.

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