23XI, Front Row seeking F1 financial information from Liberty Media

As the discovery process in the antitrust lawsuit brought by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports continues, the teams want a Colorado court to force Liberty Media to comply with a subpoena to produce financial information.

The teams filed a joint lawsuit against NASCAR in October. In addition to calling the sport a monopoly, they allege anticompetitive practices. The lawsuit stems from the 2025 charter agreement, which 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports did not sign.

Liberty Media owns Formula 1. There are no charters in Formula 1, however, there is a Concorde Agreement that originated in the 1980s, and has been frequently updated since. It is a contract between the race teams, the FIA, and Formula 1 covering how the sport is run from a commercial standpoint.

23XI and Front Row want to see documentation from January 1, 2016, through December 31, 2024. Those dates coincide with when Charter Agreements were first introduced in NASCAR.

The information they’re seeking includes:

· The percentage and types of revenue shared with or among league and teams

· The formula for splitting each category of revenue among the teams and league

· The amounts of revenue shared with or restrained by the league and the teams

· Documents that show the valuations of expansion or current teams

· The League Constitution, by-laws, and collective bargaining agreement

The teams claim their “subpoena to F1 seeks financial information relevant to providing antitrust injury and calculating the damages incurred by Plaintiffs under the well-accepted ‘yardstick’ measure of estimating damages in an antitrust litigation.” It goes on to say that “F1 has no valid basis for its refusal to produce the requested information. F1 has argued the requests are unduly burdensome, but Plaintiffs have made a compromise offer that substantially narrows their requests; Plaintiffs only seek discrete categories of financial information on ‘documents sufficient to show; basis and one agreement; and do not demand any custodial email searches for any F1 executives or employees.”

The subpoena was issued to Liberty Media on February 19, after the discovery process in the antitrust lawsuit began. However, Formula 1 refused to produce any documents, which led the counsel for 23XI and Front Row to meet with Formula 1’s counsel to narrow the requests to the five points listed above. Formula 1 continued to refuse during another meeting, which they requested, that was held on April 4.

“… and, instead, suggested that Plaintiffs should attempt to use Liberty Media’s 10-K public filings to ‘reverse engineer’ the requested financial data.” But the teams say those filings “only contain top-line total revenue numbers – they do not provide the revenue or types that F1 shares with its teams, nor the formula that F1 uses for splitting revenues between F1 and the teams.”

23XI and Front Row also stated that it is common in antitrust cases for the revenues of Plaintiffs to be compared to those of others in a similar market. As such, Liberty Media is not the only sporting organization that 23XI and Front Row are seeking financial information from, as a motion was filed on March 31 to compel the NFL, NBA, and NHL to comply with subpoenas.

The fact discovery closes on June 30. The trial date is December 1.