Race teams suing NASCAR subpoena F1's Liberty Media financial agreement documents

As part of the discovery process in its lawsuit against NASCAR, 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports is pursuing legal recourse against Formula 1 owning Liberty Media in the form of documents that detail the financial agreements between the sanctioning body and competitors.

The two teams, which have sued NASCAR on federal antitrust grounds and were countersued last month, have asked the federal district court of Colorado to compel Liberty Media to comply with a subpoena of documents.

23XI and Front Row first served the subpoena on February 19, 2025 and it requested documents concerning the following items:

Revenue shared between Formula 1 and its teams
The formula that determines the revenue split
Actual amounts of money retained and shared
Valuations or sale prices of F1 teams
The Concorde Agreement document

The Concorde Agreement is basically the document that regulates all things business and competition in Formula 1 and is best described to the layman as its version of the NASCAR Charter Agreement, which has been used and updated periodically since 1981.

That subpoena can be viewed at the link just below this sentence.

Subpoena Download

Liberty Media responded to that request and stated that 23XI and Front Row had no legal standing to request those documents and that it has nothing to do with their legal dispute. Their words below in italics:

“First, the subpoena is overbroad in its entirety. Liberty Media has no connection to the underlying action between Plaintiffs and Defendants NASCAR and James France.”

Liberty Media asserts that producing these documents would exert ‘undue and substantial infringement on its right to maintain confidential some of its most closely guarded trade secrets and business information’ while also arguing that Formula 1 is a subsidiary and that the federal district court has no standing in the matter anyway.

That response is linked directly below.

Liberty response Download

Liberty Media also says that 23XI and Front Row withdrew this request, which is true to a point, as the emails below shows a lawyer representing the two teams asking for a more narrowly tailored documents request in advance of a conversation between the two parties.

Now, the teams are asking for that information but only for the time period of January 1 2016 to December 31, 2024, which as the lawyer representing the team states, ‘coincides with start of the NASCAR Cup Series charter system which makes it the relevant period for the purpose of the analyses we intend to do relating to anti-competitive effects and damages.’

Those emails are linked directly below.

1-6 Download

1-7 Download

A meeting between the two parties on April 4 once again produced the same results, Liberty Media not complying and thus this next step.

23XI and Front Row’s legal team is now asking the Federal District Court of Colorado to force Liberty Media to comply with the subpoena. The teams state that F1 must comply because the requests are relevant to the lawsuit.

The teams arguments include below but are not limited to:

“Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45 permits a party to serve a subpoena on a non-party to produce documents.”

“Those documents are squarely relevant to the claims in the underlying Litigation because they will provide Plaintiffs with a benchmark to assess the impact of NASCAR’s monopolistic conduct and thus the damages to Plaintiffs. By contrast, F1 cannot show the requests—as narrowed through Plaintiffs’ compromise offers—will impose any undue burden.”

“Plaintiffs’ requests to F1 easily clear the Rule 26 relevancy bar. Plaintiffs’ theory is that— but for NASCAR’s anticompetitive restrictions—team owners would receive better terms, such as a larger portion of NASCAR’s television and media-rights revenues and permanent team status in NASCAR.

“Financial data from F1 and the Concorde Agreement (and the other major leagues from which Plaintiffs seek identical information) provide a key yardstick for Plaintiffs’ experts to assess and compare the terms that NASCAR teams receive against those of teams in comparable professional sports leagues that are unfettered by the anticompetitive restrictions imposed by NASCAR.

“In antitrust cases such as this one, plaintiffs commonly prove impact and damages precisely this way—by comparing their revenues to those of firms in a similar market unaffected by the antitrust violation.”

In other words, the teams are asking such information from other leagues as well. In fact, the teams have also issued similar subpoenas to each of the major stick-and-ball sports leagues as well. The reasons are plainly said in the Liberty Media legal filing below:

“The requested information from F1 will help Plaintiffs’ experts formulate an opinion on the terms and revenues NASCAR teams would have received but for NASCAR’s unlawful monopolization of premier stock car racing.”