It’s been a couple of weeks now that the Charlotte courtroom drama has been turning NASCAR inside out. What started as a charter fight between 23XI Racing, Front Row Motorsports, and the France family has become a full-blown look at how the sport actually makes money and who gets to keep it. Every day brings new emails, new numbers, and new headaches for the folks in Daytona. Right now, it’s coming from an economist talking from the stands.

The plaintiff teams, 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports, seek their share of the damages, asking for a whopping $365 million from NASCAR. And as they revealed this massive figure, the senior sports economist then exposed how much more NASCAR can still pay them without going bankrupt.

Edward Snyder says NASCAR could pay teams way more

The plaintiffs want $365 million in total for what they say they’ve lost under NASCAR’s alleged ‘anti-competitive’ rules. That’s a big number, but Edward Snyder claimed that even paying the teams $300 million a year on top of this won’t make NASCAR go bankrupt. It would just force them to share more fairly.

He used NASCAR’s own paperwork to show teams have been paid less than they’d get in any normal market. Every time someone inside the company talked about a breakaway league or more competition, it was always discouraged, and instead, the rules were tightened, and the tracks were locked to avoid losing anyone. To him, that’s textbook monopoly behavior: control everything so nobody else can play.

He lined NASCAR up next to the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, even F1 and IndyCar. In those leagues, teams own a real piece of the pie, can build value, and can move if they want. In NASCAR, teams rent their spot, can’t race stock cars anywhere else, and watch most new money stay with the league. Edward Snyder called it suppressing competition off the track, not just managing it on the track.

When lawyers tried the “we can’t afford it” defense, he shut it down. Three hundred million more a year to teams? NASCAR would feel it, but it wouldn’t go bankrupt. It would just have to run more like every other major sport and less like a private kingdom.

That $365 million the teams want isn’t random either. It’s what 23XI and Front Row Motorsports say they lost because they couldn’t shop parts, couldn’t race elsewhere, couldn’t grow their charters like real assets. They’re not just asking for a check. They’re asking the court to make NASCAR treat them like partners instead of renters.

Edward Snyder’s job is to show damages, how much money teams lost because they weren’t free to compete. If the jury buys his math, the whole charter system, track deals, everything could be on the table. And the scary part for NASCAR is that he says they can pay it without the lights going out in Daytona.

The same trial that got Edward Snyder talking money is about to get a lot more personal.

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Richard Childress ready to tell his side

Richard Childress, six-time championship owner and NASCAR legend, is expected to take the stand soon. And everybody knows why he’s mad.

Leaked texts showed NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps calling Childress a redneck who “needs to be taken out back and flogged.” Those words came out in discovery and hit Childress hard. Now he gets his turn to talk under oath about how the charter talks really felt from the owner’s side.

Childress is one of the old guard, the kind of guy who helped build the sport into what it is. Seeing his name dragged like that by the people running it today? That’s personal. His testimony could turn the heat up even more on a trial that’s already burning hot.

From Edward Snyder saying NASCAR can easily afford to pay teams better to Richard Childress getting ready to tell the jury exactly how it felt to be insulted by the top brass, the message is the same: the garage is tired of being told to be grateful for scraps.

Michael Jordan, Denny Hamlin, Bob Jenkins, and now maybe Childress are all saying the same thing in different ways. The France family built something huge, but the people who fill the cars every Sunday want a real seat at the table, not just a thank-you note and a charter that never grows.

Edward Snyder says the money is there. Childress might just show the jury why the trust is gone.