It’s the sequel nobody asked for.
NASCOURT is back in session with Joe Gibbs Racing alleging that former competition director Chris Gabehart conspired to steal information from the team and take it with him to Spire Motorsports in a lawsuit filed on Feb. 19.
Does it carry the same stakes as the NASCAR vs. Front Row Motorsports and 23XI Racing lawsuit that played out over the last year? No, at least it doesn’t appear that way. Where it does go pound-for-pound is in the drama department.
Private investigators, conspiracy allegations, Ty Gibbs disses … this case has everything it needs to become headline fodder across the sport, even though it may just be a case of hurt feelings and bruised egos once one digs a little deeper.
Case in point, the scathing response Spire filed to the court that included a statement from team co-owner Jeff Dickerson. In it, he doesn’t necessarily give a picture of who he and Spire Motorsports are but instead dwells on who they are not.
Let’s unpack this quote by quote.
“Spire has literally grown up in front of the industry and is a true underdog story. Besides being a marketing and management company that provides services to drivers, manufacturers and teams in the NASCAR ranks, including JGR, we had no natural path to being NASCAR team owners.”
An underdog story is what Spire was able to author in its first year of competition, getting in victory lane with Justin Haley at the rain-shortened 2019 summer Daytona International Speedway race. But the underdog title for the organization? That’s kind of contradicted when you consider how Spire originally became a thing.
Dickerson has been in racing for years, originally a USAC midget racer before going into management in 2001 with Motorsports Management International. In 2010, he and TJ Puchyr started Spire Sports + Entertainment and continued connecting teams, sponsors and drivers.
Presumably, the decade with that company is what enabled them to get a bank loan for $6 million to buy Furniture Row Racing’s charter. And after that, they had enough financial levers to pull to buy the assets from Leavine Family Racing in 2020.
Were their beginnings challenging? Of course. But they’re not unique. Dickerson and Puchyr didn’t find some magic code. They had the same thing the majority of owners in the NASCAR Cup Series have, and the only essential ingredient needed to being an owner in any sport: money.
JGR Adds Spire as Defendant in Lawsuit; Seeks Temporary Restraining Order Against Chris Gabehart
“We didn’t own a conglomerate of fast-food franchises, didn’t own any car dealerships, we weren’t titans of the industry, we had never won any super bowls, heck we could barely afford to attend Super Bowls on our own dime.”
It’s an interesting move to throw shade at some of the other teams in the sport, intentionally or not. Especially when considering the guy that owned a bunch of car dealerships, Rick Hendrick, is a current partner of its team through HendrickCars.com.
They weren’t titans of the industry, but people sure knew about Spire S+E before it bought a charter in 2019. Just not always for great reasons. In terms of drivers, there was plenty of success. Kyle Larson, Ross Chastain and Todd Gilliland all got their foot in the door of NASCAR thanks to Spire.
Sponsorship, on the other hand, was a mixed bag. 5-Hour Energy negotiated a contract with Spire that ensured wherever its sponsorship ended up, Clint Bowyer would follow. When Michael Waltrip Racing went under in 2015, Bowyer was forced to run for HScott Motorsports and had the worst season of his career. By the way, MWR’s GM Ty Norris, a key figure in Spingate in 2013? He got a job with Spire shortly after MWR closed.
Then there’s DC Solar and the domino effect it had on the careers of several Spire drivers, most notably Chastain and Brennan Poole. In June 2018, Poole sued Chip Gannasi Racing and Spire, claiming they conspired to take his DC Solar sponsorship and give it to Larson, who had just debuted in the Cup Series.
Poole said Spire misrepresented potential deals, like insisting JR Motorsports wanted $7.5 million for a ride when the number was closer to $3 million, and accused Spire of misleading DC Solar into staying with CGR despite his departure from the team. The two sides settled out of court and all seemed to blow over … until the FBI raided DC Solar headquarters in December that year, and it was revealed the company was committing massive fraud. DC Solar execs wound up in jail, and CGR wound up out of NASCAR just a few years later.
As for going to the Super Bowl, I’m sure those tickets weren’t cheap. Glad they could squeeze enough money together to go to the largest yearly sporting event in North America, one that the rest of us have to settle for watching on TV every year.
“We have never won any NBA Championships, didn’t own our own brand of shoes … ”
NBA titles, no. ECHL titles, yes.
One of three minor league hockey teams Spire S+E owns, the Trois-Rivières Lions in Quebec, won the Kelly Cup last season, though this year the club is second to last in the league in average attendance.
And hey, shoes don’t have to be off the table. After all, Spire S+E has had the time and money to throw its hat into the ring of music, eSports and other racing ventures like sprint cars and short track promotions. Next could be shoes, and then world domination.
Speaking of guys with NBA titles and shoes, remember when Dickerson was brought up in that NASCAR v. 23XI/FRM trial? What was that for again?
Oh, right, it was him texting an unnamed person about his appearance on the Business of Motorsports podcast, in which Dickerson mentioned having “hit a couple of our talking points” and thinking he’d get thrown out of the Race Team Alliance.
“Going to torpedo the whole negotiation, good work,” the unnamed texter said.
Guess there are other ways to get a pat on the back and an atta boy from NASCAR if it’s not from winning.
“Hadn’t won seven NASCAR championships as a driver and weren’t carrying the family legacy like some of our colleagues in the Cup Series.”
No, the name Dickerson isn’t synonymous with racing like Johnson or Petty. But Busch was when Spire bought up the assets of Kyle Busch Motorsports in 2021. So was Ware when co-founder Puchyr bought Rick Ware Racing last year, resulting in another episode of NASCOURT with the aforementioned Johnson and Petty’s Legacy Motor Club.
A lack of industry notoriety didn’t stop Spire from buying out some of those more recognizable colleagues.
“We had no name recognition or gimmick to attract sponsors or employees. No family money or any wealth to speak of to give comfort to anyone that we had any statin power at all. What we had was our vision to build a team one brick at a time, not to cut corners, stay disciplined with our process and steadily improve.”
Wasn’t attracting sponsors sort of their job before you bought a race team? It had no money even after the Poole and DC Solar thing?
It’s hard to say it didn’t cut corners to start. It shared facilities with Premium Motorsports, then RWR in 2019. The final race of the season at Homestead-Miami Speedway saw driver Reed Sorenson repeatedly told to pit late. When he did, it retired the car for what was listed as mechanical issues.
Later, Puchyr was fined $50,000 for manipulating the race — along with RWR — in order to give Premium’s No. 27 car the highest finish in points among non-chartered teams.
Money surely isn’t an issue now as Spire is a member of TWG Motorsports, which also operates Andretti Global and the Cadillac Formula 1 team, among others. That group was started in 2024 by Mark Walter, the CEO of Guggenheim Partners, and its $345 billion in assets includes ownership shares in the Los Angeles Dodgers, Lakers, Sparks and the entire PWHL.
“Our legitimacy was questioned both publicly and privately in the industry. Nobody could understand why we would take on a challenge this big. I do not believe anybody is doubting our capabilities now.”
It seems like Joe Gibbs Racing is doubting it, seeing as it took the team to court. While the trial will surely play out over the next few months in a saga that could shake the direction of both teams, the statement from Dickerson stands apart from it in its own nauseating way.
By taking shots at other teams and listing all the things Dickerson feels don’t apply to Spire, it undercuts and buries what the organization is: a team with a lot of money to throw around that wasn’t afraid to bend the rules or pick off competition in any way it could, all while selling a story of a team that picked itself up by its bootstraps.
In other words, Spire is just like everyone else.
Gibbs talks about his team’s humble beginnings and family-oriented organization even though the team is now partially owned by the Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment Group and Arctos Partners.
Legacy has ambassadors Richard Petty and Maury Gallagher as the faces of the company, while Knighthead Capital Management, a New York-based investment advisor with a stake in Hertz, pays the bills.
Richard Childress complains about NASCAR picking on his little team while 40% of it has been owned by Chartwell Investments, another private equity firm in New York, for over two decades.
The sport, the money involved and how they interact with each other have all evolved in recent years, and that’s fine. Wherever teams are getting their money will be fine by race fans as long as the cars wind up on the track. But after a season and trial where those fans finally drove home the point that their intelligence had been insulted for too long by the sanctioning body, it feels time to do the same for owners.
To Dickerson, Gibbs and all owners in the Cup Series: By all means, keep celebrating your team’s successes and the work you’ve done to help facilitate them. But drop the hero sob stories of building your team from nothing, especially those set in the 21st century.
