Two titans of NASCAR, Roger Penske and Rick Hendrick, are actively pushing back against a court order compelling their deposition in the ongoing antitrust lawsuit filed by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports against NASCAR. The legendary team owners, who were recently subpoenaed, have filed a motion to significantly limit the scope of their testimony, citing concerns over the potential disclosure of highly confidential business and financial information.

The legal maneuver comes just days after Hendrick and Penske were initially slated for deposition, a development that arose after legal representatives for 23XI and Front Row accused NASCAR of “sandbagging” them. According to the plaintiffs’ argument, NASCAR had named the two prominent figures to its witness list without providing sufficient opportunity for due diligence and discovery.

In their motion to the court, attorneys representing Hendrick and Penske, led by Adam Ross, argue that their clients are being placed in an “unenviable position of being forced to give expansive and unnecessary deposition testimony.” The core of their objection lies in the plaintiffs’ alleged intent to delve into sensitive financial and business records of Hendrick Motorsports (HMS) and Penske Racing (PRS), as well as private communications surrounding the pivotal 2016 Charter Agreement negotiations.

The legal team asserts that Hendrick and Penske agreed to provide limited testimony at the trial, specifically concerning the high-level contents of declarations they had previously submitted. This agreement was reportedly made in light of their long-standing relationship with NASCAR Chairman and CEO Jim France, and with the explicit understanding that they would not be compelled to “take sides” in the lawsuit.

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“Messrs. Hendrick and Penske, in view of their decades-long relationship with Jim France, agreed to give limited testimony regarding non-confidential matters at the trial of this case, but in a way that did not force them to ‘take sides’ in this lawsuit – something which both men have made clear that they cannot and will not do,” the motion states. “That has now morphed into an effort by the Plaintiffs to seek testimony potentially regarding HMS’s and Penske’s highly confidential financial and other business information.”

The situation escalated when, according to Ross, NASCAR counsel approached Hendrick and Penske in the days leading up to their initial deposition. They were asked if they would be willing to testify at trial, with the testimony strictly limited to their prior declarations. Both owners, who have consistently expressed a desire to remain neutral in the legal dispute, agreed to this narrow scope of testimony, provided they were duly subpoenaed.

However, the plaintiffs reportedly rejected this proposed compromise. “Plaintiffs refused and made clear that they intended to ask numerous questions of both men regarding their respective race teams’ highly confidential business and financial records, private communications regarding the negotiations leading up to the initial 2016 Charter Agreement, and other highly confidential topics,” the motion elaborates.

Hendrick and Penske contend that discussions regarding their teams’ financial records or the intricacies of the 2016 charter agreement are inappropriate and irrelevant to the core issues of the lawsuit. They emphasize that their teams are direct competitors with both NASCAR and the plaintiffs for sponsorships, employees, and on-track performance. The disclosure of such sensitive information, they argue, would be “incredibly burdensome and harmful.”

Furthermore, the motion highlights a previous court order from June 25, 2025, which significantly restricted the information that non-party teams were required to provide. This order stipulated that any financial data submitted to NASCAR by entities like HMS and PRS must be in an “anonymous and untraceable format.” The current deposition requests, the defense argues, directly undermine this prior ruling.

“The testimony that Plaintiffs now seek will undermine the entirety of the Court’s decision as related to HMS and PRS and potentially allow the Parties (or the media or general public) to ‘reverse engineer’ the anonymized team information to back out HMS and PRS in an effort to identify the sources of the other team information,” the motion reads. This raises concerns about the potential for proprietary information to be inadvertently revealed, jeopardizing the competitive standing of these prominent organizations.

The timing of the deposition requests also presents a logistical challenge. With Thanksgiving approaching and the trial drawing nearer, Hendrick and Penske are seeking to conduct their depositions remotely via Zoom. This, they argue, would mitigate the burden and allow for a more efficient process, while still adhering to the proposed limited scope of questioning.

The underlying antitrust lawsuit centers on allegations that NASCAR has engaged in anti-competitive practices that unfairly benefit its own affiliated teams and disadvantage others. 23XI Racing, co-owned by Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan, and Front Row Motorsports, owned by Bob Jenkins, are among the teams that have voiced concerns about the structure of the sport and the control NASCAR wields.

The 2016 Charter Agreement, which established a new framework for team ownership and revenue sharing in NASCAR’s premier Cup Series, has been a focal point in discussions surrounding the sport’s economic model. The agreement was intended to provide greater stability for teams and a more predictable revenue stream, but its terms and the negotiations leading up to it have become a subject of scrutiny in this legal battle.

The legal teams representing Hendrick and Penske are urging the court to uphold the principles of the June 2025 order, emphasizing that there is no compelling need for the disclosure of their clients’ confidential financial and business information. They maintain that any questioning, even regarding the anonymized average per-car data previously submitted, could inadvertently lead to the identification of specific teams, thereby violating the court’s prior directive. The outcome of this motion will likely have significant implications for the discovery process and the eventual presentation of evidence in this high-profile antitrust case.

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