When the charter lawsuit ended late last year, most of the people involved in the sport thought that NASCAR’s days of spending days in the courtroom were over. While it currently stands true for the sport’s governing body, the phenomenon doesn’t stand tall when it comes to the teams that are a part of the proceedings.
And with the latest development in the off-track realm of NASCAR, a former driver has taken it upon himself to start ringing the alarm bells for the sport.
Former NASCAR Driver Sends Out a Grim Warning Amid the Next-Gen Car Era
Just ahead of the Atlanta race weekend, Joe Gibbs Racing has decided to file a lawsuit against its former Director, Chris Gabehart. The team alleges a “brazen scheme” that resulted in damages worth $8 million, with the fallout sending ripples throughout the NASCAR world.
Per JGR, the scheme involves setup files, payroll records, and pit data allegedly collected with the intention of providing them to Spire Motorsports. With that going on, former Cup Series driver Brian Keselowski decided to chime in on the conversation and claim that such cases might soon become the norm in NASCAR.
Responding to an update on X by Jordan Bianchi, Keselowski claimed that the arrival of the Next-Gen car in 2022Â made a push for parity that shall soon give way to more such lawsuits. With there being no team-specific parts, NASCAR is on a path to becoming more engineering-specific, making it easier to copy-paste setups.
“This is going to become more common because of the nature of this car. It has no special race team specific parts. So that means everyone has the same things to worry about with. Extremely more engineering driven, and easier to copy and paste amongst the field.”
Further along the conversation, an X user asked whether the fallout had anything to do with how Gabehart left the team. Replying to the same, Keselowski claimed that much of it depends on the contract that the entities had signed, which he has no knowledge of.
The 44-year-old added that teams generally have safeguards built into the contracts, but they aren’t very enforceable once the contract is terminated.
Keselowski added that it is no longer the norm for a person moving teams to build a car as they did elsewhere. With the cars remaining nearly the same across the board, it has become fairly easy to continue using what a team has been using for the last few years.
As for the lawsuit in question, at the moment, the legal process is just beginning, with the case being filed in a North Carolina federal court. While Gabehart still has time to respond to the allegations, the filing does not block him from starting work for another team.
