As the discovery process in the antitrust lawsuit brought by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports continues, the teams want a Colorado court to force Liberty Media to comply with a subpoena to produce fin ancial information.
The teams filed a joint lawsuit against NASCAR in October. In addition to calling the sport a monopoly, they allege anticompetitive practices. The lawsuit stems from the 2025 charter agreement, which 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports did not sign.
Liberty Media owns Formula 1. There are no charters in Formula 1, however, there is a Concorde Agreement that originated in the 1980s, and has been frequently updated since. It is a contract between the race teams, the FIA, and Formula 1 covering how the sport is run from a commercial standpoint.
23XI and Front Row want to see documentation from January 1, 2016, through December 31, 2024. Those dates coincide with when Charter Agreements were first introduced in NASCAR.
The information they’re seeking includes:
· The percentage and types of revenue shared with or among league and teams
· The formula for splitting each category of revenue among the teams and league
· The amounts of revenue shared with or restrained by the league and the teams
· Documents that show the valuations of expansion or current teams
· The League Constitution, by-laws, and collective bargaining agreement
The teams claim their “subpoena to F1 seeks financial information relevant to providing antitrust injury and calculating the damages incurred by Plaintiffs under the well-accepted ‘yardstick’ measure of estimating damages in an antitrust litigation.” It goes on to say that “F1 has no valid basis for its refusal to produce the requested information. F1 has argued the requests are unduly burdensome, but Plaintiffs have made a compromise offer that substantially narrows their requests; Plaintiffs only seek discrete categories of financial information on ‘documents sufficient to show; basis and one agreement; and do not demand any custodial email searches for any F1 executives or employees.”