Denny Hamlin Shuts Down Allegations Against Michael Jordan’s $15-Million-Worth Associate as He Reveals the Truth Behind the Teams’ Protest

The quarterly meeting between NASCAR and the teams on Wednesday, April 5, saw a fair bit of drama. The topic of discussion was the distribution of revenue among the teams. However, as the two parties have been at an impasse on this issue, all of the team owners decided to boycott the meeting. This was because they felt that there was not going to be any progress on that front. Post the boycott, there were some rumors that the ringleaders of the boycott were 23XI Racing owner Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan’s associate, Curtis Polk.

Owing to this, Hamlin has gone on record to clear the air regarding those rumors. In the latest iteration of the Actions Detrimental podcast, Hamlin mentioned, “This is a misconception. This is not about Denny Hamlin and Curtis Polk rallying the troops of the teams and finally going after the money and NASCAR.

“Teams have been going in and out of business for decades. We’ve had a championship team in Furniture Row [2017 championship winner], go out of business the next year. This has been a problem for decades.”

Denny Hamlin revealed how Polk’s involvement has been an eye-opener

The Joe Gibbs Racing star lamented that teams going out of business was a side-effect of teams getting into business with NASCAR. According to him, Polk and a number of team owners did their homework and presented their findings to the board. Unfortunately, it appears that the direction the officials were racing did not align with the team owners.

Hamlin said, “What I think Curtis and his expertise bring, coming from another sport, is basically saying, ‘Why do we not have our costs covered?’

“All other sports, your cost is covered through media revenue. And then you create other revenue through sponsorship or whatever. But they knew, before they even hit the court or field, that the media rights revenue, covers whatever it costs to go compete.

“So then they did some big analysis over what does it cost us to compete at a high level in NASCAR.”

After doing the analyses, the teams shared their inputs with NASCAR.

NASCAR’s clever response to the insights shared by the teams

Hamlin continued, “Once we presented that number to NASCAR, ‘Here’s what it costs if you’re a single car team, to run 15th. They [NASCAR] immediately started saying, ‘Okay so how can we cut that down?’

“First they started saying ‘let us help you get to that number to cover your cars.’

“Then they started saying, ‘How can we cut that number down for you guys? We’ll help you guys. We’re going to help you spend the money you have,’ versus what we deemed a fair share.”

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This is the point at which the impasse has been created. For the teams, the tactics being used by NASCAR are quite obvious, as explained further by Hamlin, “They were not going to give us anything that was not part of an agreement. Which is why these talks are so important right now and that we get it right. We can’t have these talks again for another 10 years. We have to make sure that we secure the teams’ health for the next decade.”

In essence, he hopes that the teams and the sport can reach a consensus soon. Otherwise, a rift would not be a good look at all and it is important for everyone to see eye-to-eye.

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