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MOORESVILLE, N.C. — In the late summer of 2018, motorsports agency executives Jeff Dickerson and T.J. Puchyr hit a wall.
Tasked with brokering a sale for a “charter” — NASCAR’s version of a franchise — on behalf of a top team owner looking to exit racing, Dickerson and Puchyr’s company, Spire Sports + Entertainment, was finding no takers after two potential deals fell through.
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The asking price? A cool $6 million. None of the previous charters were believed to sell for more than a few million, so potential buyers balked at what seemed like an astronomical amount.
But Dickerson and Puchyr were certain the charter — which belonged to Furniture Row Racing owner Barney Visser and was the second-most valuable in NASCAR as determined by the three-year performance of the car — was worth every bit of $6 million and more.
So as they sat with their executive team in the third-floor conference room of a nondescript office building in suburban Charlotte, an idea started floating around.
Could we buy this thing ourselves … and start a race team?
Though Spire was a successful agency, brokering sponsor and driver deals throughout NASCAR, neither Dickerson nor Puchyr had anywhere close to the means it would take to write Visser a $6 million check. But they were confident enough to bet the house — literally.
Two floors below them, a branch of the United Community Bank presented a potential opportunity. The bank agreed to give them a loan to cover most of the cost, and Puchyr borrowed the rest from former team owner Todd Braun to make the down payment to Visser.
“We were never afraid to lose everything because we didn’t have anything,” Dickerson said. “It’s an easier risk model when you’re already broke.”
Five and a half years later, the gamble has more than paid off. The most valuable charters in NASCAR are now projected to be worth more than $50 million; the bottom of the market, set when Spire purchased another charter from a backmarker team last year, is more than $40 million, according to The Athletic’s reporting.
Along with their associates, Dickerson and Puchyr have wheeled-and-dealed their way through the charter market; their fingerprints are on 14 transactions in total. Some have been deals brokered for others and some have been for themselves, but the smoke has cleared with Spire Motorsports becoming a full-fledged three-car Cup Series team — with eyes on playoff contention in the near future.
“Beyond your highest expectations,” Puchyr said, his voice trailing off. “I get choked up talking about it.”
To understand why anyone would want to pay more than $50 million for the right to operate a NASCAR team — which doesn’t even include the cost of the cars, drivers, crews or actually making it to the racetrack 38 times per year — it just takes a quick glance at the broader sports landscape.
NBA teams are selling ownership stakes at valuations of more than $3 billion. The Baltimore Orioles were sold for $1.725 billion last month, which was called a surprisingly low valuation by analysts.
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NASCAR teams are nowhere near that level, but it’s been less than a decade since the charter system was founded and NASCAR has races shown on Fox and NBC (with Amazon Prime and TNT coming in 2025 as part of a $7.7 billion TV deal). It’s why Dickerson believes even $50 million for charters is just scratching the surface.
“If you look at the model and where we are in the journey,” he said, “we’re the NBA in 1985.”
Last year, owners of a new MLS team in San Diego paid a $500 million franchise fee — 67 times more than what it cost in 2005. Franchise fees for the National Women’s Soccer League have reached $50 million, but NWSL games have been primarily streamed on Paramount+ (though the league recently signed a new, expanded TV deal).
In that sense, NASCAR’s relatively low charter cost and easily accessible viewing represents one of the last untapped opportunities for investors to establish a position in the pro sports media rights windfall — something Spire (which also has an ownership stake in two minor-league hockey teams) senses from the potential investors making inquiries.
“It’s people who missed the boat on MLS or couldn’t get the NBA team they wanted,” Dickerson said. “T.J. and I would have never been able to get in now. You’re talking about real money. It’s matured. The people calling us, it’s private equity firms kicking the tires — not just some independent sports entrepreneur.”
If there was a prospective owner who wanted to have a NASCAR team, they could opt for one of two approaches. One would be to purchase an existing team, with its charters and assets, as Trackhouse Racing owner Justin Marks did in 2021 for a reported $40-plus million; the other would be to buy a charter and start a team from scratch, as Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan did when they founded 23XI Racing in late 2020.
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Spire took the long-term route because that was the only option — and even that was a stretch.
“We didn’t have the luxury to (buy an existing team) because we weren’t sitting on a pile of money,” Dickerson said. “We literally just bought a piece of paper.”
NASCAR and the teams collaborated on an agreement to create those “pieces of paper” in 2016, which gives 36 cars a guaranteed spot in all 36 points races on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule. Payouts from the charters come from four “buckets” — fixed money for entering the race, money based on a car’s historical performance (which is weighted over a three-year period), year-end finish from the overall season points fund, and winnings from an individual race.
The idea was to give teams security. Merely holding the charters was an asset they never had previously, and the guaranteed entries also helped teams sell sponsorship — knowing there was no chance the car would fail to qualify for the race.
Cal Wells III, now CEO of the Legacy Motor Club team, said his experience owning a race team (PPI Motorsports) that went out of business was commonplace in the pre-charter days.
“You had an auction, sold all your stuff and your pit boxes, and you got 10 cents on the dollar,” Wells said.
That’s one of the major reasons former Michael Waltrip Racing co-owner Rob Kauffman pushed so hard for the creation of the charter system. Kauffman’s team wasn’t able to stick around long enough to reap the big rewards from rising charter values (when MWR shut down, no one was paying more than $1-2 million for the brand-new charters), but the system has been a boon to the remaining organizations.
“Rob is the one who set the stake in the ground and built out the charter model,” Wells said. “Without him, we would have lost a lot more teams.”
With owners now able to show real value with their charters and take on investors, it’s attracted the likes of billionaire Josh Harris — who owns the NFL’s Washington Commanders, NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers and NHL’s New Jersey Devils, and who made a significant minority investment into Joe Gibbs Racing last year. That was a sign to the broader sports world, Dickerson said, that “the water is fine.”
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“It’s not like Josh Harris was doing this as a favor to Gibbs,” Dickerson said. “He didn’t buy into JGR for s—- and giggles. You can look at us as the gamblers, but something is going on here.”
But there is an element of gambling now, especially with NASCAR’s charter agreement with the teams set to expire at the end of this year. Ongoing talks have been contentious, and the exclusive negotiating window recently expired after already being extended once. Teams want a bigger slice of the NASCAR revenue pie, and though NASCAR officials have agreed to do so in principle, the amount remains in dispute.
Still, a new charter agreement is widely expected to be reached — even if there are some hardliners among the teams. And when the deal gets done?
“This will be MLS,” Dickerson said. “Eight more Josh Harrises will try to get in.”
But what if that’s not reality, and this is actually the top of the charter market? What if the rush to grab charters pushed up the values and created a giant bubble?
Dickerson countered that question by citing Spire’s direct knowledge of NASCAR’s financial climate, which comes through the company’s agency arm. Since its founding in 2010, Spire has been intimately involved in all sorts of deals throughout the garage. It has managed drivers, brokered sponsorships, overseen at-track activations, promoted races and managed accounts for corporate America. Clients have been as varied as Toyota and Hendrick Motorsports.
By being an active participant in the sport’s economic engine, Spire felt NASCAR’s decline — exacerbated by headlines of sharply declined TV ratings and attendance — wasn’t as bad as the public’s perception.
“We had a little bit of a downturn with some of that, but it’s coming back,” Puchyr said, then paused. “Obviously, I think it’s coming back, because Jeff and I bet everything we’ve got on it.”
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Said Dickerson: “The leap of faith was the amount of money involved, not where we were placing it. We had more faith in the sport than we had in ourselves.”
One of the trickiest parts was understanding how much money to put on the table through Spire’s various charter transactions. Other potential buyers tried and failed to drive down the price and strike a better deal. Spire didn’t want to overpay, but it also was determined to be fair with sellers — many of whom had longstanding relationships with Dickerson and Puchyr through their agency work.
Enter Wells, who served as a consultant on Spire’s charter transactions before being hired as Legacy’s CEO last July. Wells and associate Matt Strecker (“a numbers genius,” Puchyr called him) created an analytics model that came up with a precise value for each charter. Grounded in data — which included historical trends in other sports — Wells and Strecker were able to inject logic into some emotionally fraught negotiations.
“It’s no different than selling a house,” said Wells, whose mother had a real estate company in Southern California. “There are people who want them and there are people who say, ‘I’ve lived in this one long enough, but I still love it.’ How you work through that emotional labyrinth can sometimes be complex. But being able to apply a comfort and understanding is critically important to getting a deal done.”
Now, after being involved in more than one-third of all NASCAR charter transactions since the system’s implementation, Spire has shifted its focus to being more competitive on the racetrack instead of just trying to win in the boardroom. Dickerson called it “the end of an era for us.”
“I mean, look around,” he said, motioning toward the crowded floor of the race shop. “We’re not just the ‘Charter Guys’ anymore. We’re a f—— race team now.”
Last year, Spire bought Kyle Busch Motorsports and its 77,000-square-foot race shop for nearly $14.5 million. The team absorbed KBM’s Truck Series program, which shares space with Spire’s now-three-car Cup Series team (the drivers are Corey LaJoie and two rookies — Carson Hocevar and Zane Smith). Spire has a technical alliance with Hendrick, including using Hendrick engines and pit crews for two of its teams (Smith, who is under the Trackhouse umbrella, will have a crew from that organization).
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The goals are no longer modest. In Spire’s former shop, banners were hung for even a top-five or top-10 finish. Now, there are only three banners — all victories.
“We want to incrementally improve everything — the cars, the preparation of the drivers, strategy, the pit crew,” said Doug Duchardt, a longtime Hendrick and Chip Ganassi Racing executive who is now Spire’s team president.
The expansive trophy cases Busch built to house his seemingly countless prizes in the shop’s lobby are largely empty, with oversized photos of Spire vehicles in their place. There’s just one trophy, for now — a souvenir of Justin Haley’s shock win for Spire in the July 2019 race at Daytona.
“It sets a bar, thinking about how successful Kyle has been,” Dickerson said.
One year ago at this time, Spire had 40 total employees (including its front office). After purchasing KBM, the roster has ballooned to 125 people between the Cup, Truck and corporate teams. There’s even a new engineering room, a photo of which made Dickerson mockingly gasp when he saw it for the first time.
“I was like, ‘Who are these people? Those aren’t actors?!'” he said.
For a team that was worried about making payroll at times in the early days, Spire isn’t spending money like its powerhouse competitors yet. The engineering room was proudly assembled with items purchased online (“Amazon is a wonderful thing,” crew chief Ryan Sparks said), and the team’s kickoff luncheon was catered by a local Italian joint known as Olive Garden.
“T.J. and I are still borrowing our way through this,” Dickerson said. “We don’t have to skimp anymore, but we can’t just go crazy. Chip Ganassi always used to tell me: ‘Having money to burn is one thing; actually burning it is another.'”
The hope isn’t to beat Hendrick or Joe Gibbs Racing this season, but to end up on “the pointy side of the midfield,” Dickerson said. It’s a scrappy bunch of racers, many of whom were fired from other teams or told they couldn’t hack it for one reason or another.
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“The one thing we have in common is we all race with a chip on our shoulder,” Sparks said. “We’ll do whatever we can to hurt somebody’s feelings.”
One potential source of hurt feelings could be with Spire’s longtime clients. It wants to beat many of the teams it has helped in the past, and it also plans to keep some of the sponsors who walk through the door rather than shuffling them to other organizations for a commission (Chili’s, for example, will be on LaJoie’s car for the Daytona 500).
“We’re going from the cute little brother to, ‘Oh, he wants to play on varsity?'” Dickerson said. “We’re as curious as anyone to see how that goes.”
Some in the industry wonder why Spire is going through all of this in the first place. Dickerson and Puchyr, both 48, essentially hit the jackpot with their foresight and risk-tolerant decisions; surely, they could just sell the charters at a huge gain and live out their days on a beach somewhere.
But Dickerson doesn’t see the point.
“I mean, how bad do we have it right now?” he said. “What else are we going to do? Even if we sold, we’d still go to the racetrack anyway. I don’t know that you ever get out of it.”
Puchyr buys Powerball tickets every week, pooling money with others in the company who dream of winning big. But Dickerson insisted even if they did, nothing about their lives would change.
So why play Powerball, then?
“It doesn’t mean we don’t want it,” Dickerson said with a laugh. “But we already won the f—— lottery. We’re working in racing. We should all be working the lathe at a dirt track somewhere; of course we’re going to let it ride.”
The real motivation, he added, is none of them want the ride to end.
— The Athletic’s Jordan Bianchi contributed to this report
(Top photo of Spire’s first entry in the Cup Series, the No. 77 car, at a 2019 race in Michigan: Logan Riely / Getty Images)