While Michael Jordan’s charter lawsuit with NASCAR has done a lot of good in increasing team valuations close to $100 million, there’s a rumor circulating that two of the sport’s smaller teams could be forced to shut down.

According to a user called Doug Ivey on social media, “Hyak and/or Haas shutdown/charter sale incoming…” They are referring to the fact that both Hyak Motorsports and Haas Factory Team are looking forward to selling their charters to the bigger teams like RFK Racing. So why is this jump in evaluation causing a sudden collapse for these two existing teams?

Neither Hyak Motorsports nor Haas Factory Team is a standalone team in the Cup Series. HFT is a byproduct of the fallout of Stewart-Haas Racing. After they stopped operations back in 2024, SHR switched to HFT and sold one of their charters for $20-25M to Front Row Motorsports.

Similarly, Brad Daugherty and his team, JTG Daugherty Racing, went through a rebrand in 2025 as Hyak Motorsports. Running a full charter in the NASCAR Cup Series is not an easy task for anyone. Unless there are a lot of sponsors to back up the team’s operations, the team owners have to shoulder the burden.

Both Haas and Daugherty are in a similar situation with their respective teams currently. The boost in market value of their charters gives them a very interesting option. Instead of begging sponsors to help them in the Cup Series and spending money out of their own pocket to run the team, they can sell it for the current valuation and simply run a better racing program in the O’Reilly Series.

Neither of these teams has good sponsors in the NASCAR Cup Series currently. Hyak Motorsports went sponsorless for the entire past season. Meanwhile, at the Haas Factory Team, Haas Tooling is taking the brunt of running the team operations. However, in the O’Reilly Series, they have much better operations compared to their Cup campaign.

Not only that, it was revealed last year that Haas bought their charter for nearly $1.25-3M back in 2016 from Michael Waltrip. While there is no specific information about Daughterty, it is expected that he had paid a similar amount since he bought his charter in a similar timeframe. So essentially, both teams have nothing to lose in this transaction.

The rags-to-riches model that appeals to these teams

What do these two teams stand to gain from this new transaction? They will have to pay for running a charter in the O’Reilly Series, too, right? Isn’t the loss of a top series charter a big setback? To answer these questions, let’s take them one by one.

They will gain massive amounts of profit from their initial investment. They will also relieve the burden from their sponsors and have breathing room for running their operations with a surplus, instead of running sponsor teams that slowly chip away at their entire treasury.

The likes of HFT are currently P4 and P13 in the O’Reilly Series. They also have a win with Sheldon Creed. They are better off in the second tier of NASCAR compared to the Cup Series. Also, similar to Richard Childress’ deal with Cletus McFarland, they will be able to reel in part-time drivers and sponsors who usually pay their way in for a few O’Reilly runs.

The best example of the success of this formula is Gene Haas’s Formula 1 experiment itself. Nearly a decade ago, the Haas F1 team brought forward a new model into the sport. They were able to cut corners and use cost-effective measures to stay alive for the first few years while actively scouring for sponsors.

Today, they are P4 in the championship standings among the 10 teams. They are also better than Red Bull Racing currently, which was a championship-winning team for the past years. Now, instead of relying on untrustworthy sponsors, they have Toyota Gazoo Racing working with them as their title sponsors.

TGR is also handling their technical department and their day-to-day racing operations. So Gene Haas might’ve been running his team on fumes back in the day. But now, it looks like the Haas F1 team is ready to challenge the mid-pack and probably the top runners too someday.

If they follow this type of model with similar efficiency in the O’Reilly series, it will be a boon for them. There is no point in racing in a series without sponsors or results. A team owner can only provide so much for their team by relying on their own finances. The development and technical upgrades suffer in this case.

So this is not a setback for them. Instead, it is a chance to be reborn as a better-performing team that can focus on what matters most—winning. Their current situation looks bad, but these are only rumors and have not been verified yet. Their outcomes do not seem that far away from reality.