In recent months, NASCAR has been caught in a firestorm. The antitrust lawsuit from 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports has pulled back the curtain on years of bad blood with leaked text messages between top executives, including Steve Phelps. What used to stay behind closed doors is now front-page news, and NASCAR is doing everything it can to control the story. And into that mess stepped Denny Hamlin with a post that basically said: Stop lying to the fans.

“Please give credit to [Mike Forde, NASCAR’s managing director of communications] for helping you write this propaganda piece that they want pushed to switch the narrative,” Hamlin wrote to reporter Ryan McGee after he posted an ESPN article aiming to explain the ongoing lawsuit.“Continuous lies about our stance, NASCARs motives for its actions, and continued message from the sanctioning body that everything is fine. Our fans know better.”

Barely three hours later, McGee presented his side of the story.

“Tried to hit it down the middle, thus all the “(Fill in the blank) believes…” and “(Fill in the blank) argues…”, he wrote. “Sorry you disgaree, but thanks for reading. See you Monday.”

But Denny Hamlin was not going to back down.

“Our fans have been brainwashed with their talking points for decades,” the driver hit back. “Narratives pushed by media who are intimidated by them. Lies are over starting Monday morning. It’s time for the truth. It’s time for change.”

It’s understandable why one would take issue with the article.

As pointed out by many, it starts with the headline: “23XI vs. NASCAR trial: Why Jordan wants to tear up stock car racing”.

And if that was not enough, this is what part of the content read:

“There is no community in all of professional sports like the NASCAR garage, a relatively small group of people who travel together every weekend from Valentine’s until nearly Thanksgiving, and when they aren’t on the road, all live within the same Charlotte, North Carolina, metro area.

“Hamlin is the perfect representation of it all, living in a neighborhood surrounded by NASCAR colleagues as he drives for one team, owns another and also hosts a wildly popular podcast discussing the sport. Even while he has been in the process of suing the sport, he has also been a member of NASCAR’s exploratory panel for potential changes to its postseason championship format, and less than a month ago he came within two laps of winning the Cup Series title in the season finale.”

With the trial literally days away, the post quickly turned into a public shouting match. Denny Hamlin basically told the sanctioning body that their usual playbook of polished statements and friendly media pieces isn’t cutting it this time. The texts are out there, the complaints are public, and fans have eyes. Each day, more and more people don’t believe in NASCAR’s ‘everything is fine’ approach.

All the noise about leaked texts and propaganda pieces really just circles back to the complaint NASCAR has never truly solved: The same handful of super-teams win everything while everyone else fights for leftovers.

The bigger fight has always been about the same old problem

The Next Gen car rolled out in 2022, promising cheaper parts and closer competition so smaller teams could breathe. For a hot minute, Trackhouse looked like the new kid who could hang with the giants. Then Hendrick, Gibbs, and Penske hired more engineers, found the tiny edges nobody else could afford to chase, and pulled away again.

Bill Elliott saw this movie almost twenty years ago. In 2008, he looked at the win column and said it’s always the same armies taking the trophies. Smaller teams might steal a day in the sun, but year after year, the big budgets take over the field because they have the people and the money.

“You look at Hendrick or Roush or Gibbs or Childress,” Elliott had remarked. “You look at the win column this year, and they all come from those kind of teams.”

Now, officials are floating the idea of loosening a few rules to bring back creativity. Sounds good on paper, but open the rule book, and the teams with the deepest pockets will just spend their way to another advantage as per many.