Michael Jordan’s second act is hitting top gear on Nascar’s fast track

Michael Jordan the basketball player is success personified, the legend against whom all others are measured. Michael Jordan the sports executive, on the other hand, has spent much of the past three decades falling short of his own impossible standard.

In 1999, Jordan joined Abe Pollin’s Washington Wizards ownership group as a history-making minority partner, but neither his star power nor a brief return from retirement translated into sustained team success. Eleven years later, he took over the Charlotte Bobcats, replacing BET co-founder Robert Johnson as the league’s only Black majority owner – but poor roster moves, questionable hires and three playoff appearances in 13 years, with nary one series victory, ultimately became his legacy as the principal steward of the retro-branded Charlotte Hornets.

When he sold his stake in 2023 for $3bn, in part to focus on his nascent 23XI Nascar Cup operation (pronounced twenty-three eleven), a joint venture with Jordan Brand racing ambassador Denny Hamlin, many assumed Jordan the exec would only bring about more disappointment before fully retreating into his golf and gambling hobbies. Turns out, the 63-year-old was simply on the wrong track. “I’m cursed with this competitive gene, that anything I do is from a competitive lens,” he told CBS’s Gayle King. “In some ways, that keeps me young. It keeps me aggressively thinking positively. [It] has transcended and taken over everything that I do.”

No Nascar owner in history has opened a Cup season hotter than Jordan has in 2026. Tyler Reddick, the No 23 car driver who joined the team three years ago, won four of the Cup calendar’s first six events; he started off by grabbing the checkered flag in the Daytona 500, charging to the front on the last lap just before a crash broke out in his wake. Bubba Wallace, the No 45 car driver who helped establish 23XI Racing in 2021, has finished no worse than 11th through the first five races. Even a fraction of that success would make for a remarkable year in a sport where loss is constant – sweat, sponsors, sleep.

Throughout, Jordan has watched from the pit wall before celebrating in victory lane while seemingly making himself endlessly available for on-camera interviews. (Imagine how NBC must feel, touting Jordan as a “special contributor” to their rebooted NBA coverage, only to wind up cutting and stretching their one interview with the guy before the season.) Naturally, Jordan’s new teammates frame his firm but more forgiving leadership style in basketball terms. “He emphasizes doing what you need to do to make sure you’re performing at your highest level and taking that game-winning shot,” Dave Rogers, 23XI’s senior director of competition, explained to The Athletic. “And if you make it, great. And if you don’t, move on.”

Michael Jordan celebrates after Tyler Reddick’s win in the Goodyear 400 last month in Darlington, South Carolina. Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images

23XI has been on a roll since Reddick hung on to claim the 2025 regular-season points title and push for the Cup series championship in the final race – after Wallace booked the team’s only win at the prestigious Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis. Heading into this Sunday’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway, Jordan sits atop the owner leaderboard alongside perennial powerhouses Roger Penske, Rick Hendrick and Joe Gibbs – who still employs Hamlin as a driver, as it happens. It’s a conflict of interest that can sometimes put Hamlin in the stressful position of having to choose between glory for the team he owns and risking one of his drivers to snatch victory for himself.

“I actually wiped out one of the 23XI cars last year [going] for a win on the final lap,” Hamlin told King.

“And he got a phone call from me,” Jordan shot back.

On the surface, 23XI’s streak is remarkable for a team in just its sixth year of operation. But what makes it truly astounding is that it all could’ve ended in court four months ago.

In October 2025, 23XI broke ranks with every Cup series team but one to file an antitrust lawsuit against Nascar. Jordan – well familiar with the cartel-style business practices of stick-and-ball leagues like the NBA, which allowed him to sell the Hornets for more than 10 times what he paid – effectively called out the France family, who have controlled Nascar since its inception. Among other grievances, he objected to the Frances taxing teams for the privilege of competing across their monopoly of racing circuits while hoarding revenue from the governing body’s multibillion-dollar media rights deals with Fox, NBC, TNT and Amazon.

The tradition of squeezing what MJ calls “the people putting on the show” predates patriarch Bill France Sr establishing Nascar in 1948. (Believe it or not, Big Bill was one of the more honest brokers – just better organized.) But when Jordan put his considerable clout on the line to challenge the Frances, Penske, Hendrick and other revered gatekeepers of the sport stayed on the sidelines, perhaps wary of picking a fight with Nascar’s leadership and facing the fallout alone.

Initially, Nascar seemed to hold the legal high ground: the top 36 Cup teams compete under a charter system that guarantees them a spot in each race and a share of the purse according to their finish, with binding terms. Even well-off teams seem to hold little to no leverage. In court testimony, Heather Gibbs, the daughter-in-law of Joe Gibbs and co-owner of the team, likened Nascar’s tight signing deadlines to “having a gun to your head”. It’s a fraught arrangement that leaves teams living hand to mouth.

By taking Nascar to court in October 2025, Jordan effectively bet the farm: a loss could have imperiled the very team he had spent six years building, jeopardizing drivers, sponsors and the future of 23XI itself. But he did so with the public on his side and years of experience defending intellectual property claims, winning in those courts more often than he lost too.

Michael Jordan (pictured) celebrates in victory lane after Tyler Reddick, the No 23 car driver who joined his team in 2024, Photograph: James Gilbert/Getty Images

Before long, testimony from Jordan and Gibbs, coupled with a series of inflammatory text messages that surfaced showing Nascar commissioner Steve Phelps insulting prominent team owners, proved as clutch as Jordan’s 20-footer over Byron Russell in the 1998 NBA finals – swinging the tide and contributing to Phelps’s resignation in January. After a bit more back-and-forth, Nascar agreed to settle, bringing the week and a half long trial to a close.

In some ways it was inevitable Jordan would end up leaving his mark in this fast lane. He grew up in North Carolina, the stock car racing cradle founded by bootleggers outrunning the law. He has fond memories of his shade-tree mechanic father, James, carting the family to tracks across the state to watch Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough and the like trade paint. As a player, Jordan pulled up to home games in Ferraris and Porsches. After retiring, he got into motorcycle racing, launching Michael Jordan Motorsports.

Since 2011, Hamlin has worn the Jumpman logo across his racing uniform – a sponsorship deal that began with Jordan, a genuine fan, tracking him down at a Hornets game. Hamlin says he once came across an article claiming the two were looking to buy a team, and sent it along with a message: “It’s not real, but if you want to make it real, let me know.” The rest is racing history.

“Basketball is just a small part of your life,” Charles Barkley said, interrupting March Madness coverage to reflect on his former friend. “No matter how great you are, you’re gonna be done as a young person. You have to find something else to bring you joy and happiness. I’m proud of his success in Nascar.”

Jordan hasn’t hesitated to wade into the sport’s thorny racial politics either – starting by launching his team with Wallace, the Cup series’ trailblazer who notoriously advocated for a ban on the confederate flag and won. Jordan has cast himself as the figure who can break through to would-be fans long put off by the sport’s racist vestiges, chopping it up with rappers Fat Joe and Jadakiss outside of the 23XI team hauler before last month’s Cup race in Phoenix. And while it’s striking that it took Michael Jeffrey Jordan to drag Nascar into the 21st century, kicking and screaming, it can’t be said the role doesn’t suit him.

Just let the record reflect this Nascar season as a victory for Michael Jordan the executive, his Airness rising to the occasion at last. “I’m excited that I’m connected to this sport,” Jordan told King. “I feel like I watch it through the lens of my father, or with my family – and that matters to me.”