I Don't Think We've Seen The Last Of Brandon

As a non-lawyer who nevertheless got a lot of experience covering lawsuits in the former blog, I'm particularly interested in developments with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown's efforts to find a sponsor in the face of corporate NASCAR's wish to make him just go away. No lawsuits have been filed yet, but they're plainly just offstage, yet the usual independent media legal commentators have so far had nothing to say. They're still preoccupied with Ghislaine Maxwell, which has turned out to be a bore, or January 6, ditto.

There are three parties to this matter. The first is Brandon Brown himself, who had been developing a promising career as a driver, and who had just celebrated his first major win as Talladega, AL spectators chanted "[redacted] Joe Biden!" in the stands. An interviewer attempted to sanitize this by saying they were actually chanting "Let's go Brandon!", but perversely, this immediately became a meme for the other expression in the national consciousness, to the extent that a Christmas caller was able to get an unwitting Biden himself to repeat it on national TV, to the glee of just about everyone but corporate NASCAR.

Corporate NASCAR is the second party. It was already highly uncomfortable with the implicit association of those sentiments with its audience and brand, and it had already made attempts to suppress "Let's go, Brandon!" at its events, as well as assiduously suppressing merchandise that implied any NASCAR endorsement of the chant. As for Brandon Brown himself, it was clearly NASCAR's wish that he be quietly airbrushed from the picture. Sorry, guy, breaks. Nothing personal, just learn to code.

Brown himself, however, had already said in various public statements that he wished to continue a NASCAR career, where he had become a promising second-tier driver, but the completely involuntary association had made it difficult to get sponsors. Enter LGBcoin, which Fox News describes as a collectible meme coin associated with the chant but is apparently a cryptocurrency. According to the story,

Brown’s team received approval from a racing operations employee for its sponsor and paint scheme on Dec. 26, but NASCAR indicated that sponsorship needed approval from higher-ranking officials.

On Tuesday, NASCAR announced its decision to not approve the sponsorship.

The situation has turned into a polarizing story with lots of chatter about whether the sponsorship was approved and then NASCAR backtracked, or whether Brown’s team should have known that NASCAR senior management wouldn’t approve the sponsorship based on a meeting with the team in November. The largest investor into LGBcoin is threatening a lawsuit, citing damages to those who invested in the cryptocurrency, the value of which dropped in the hours after NASCAR’s decision.

LGBCoin is the third party, which has interests allied with, but not identical to, Brown and his team, and it is clearly already threatening legal action. James Koutoulas, the investor, retweeted a summary of the situaion as he sees it (click on the image for the full text):

Someone smart on @NASCAR @Reddit Re @LGBcoin_io pic.twitter.com/68eQPd2ROw

— James Koutoulas (@jameskoutoulas) January 5, 2022

The Brown team's version is more restrained but makes the same basic point:

"The bottom line is that Brandonbilt Motorsports followed the standard process for sponsor and paint scheme approval and received approval from a NASCAR official empowered to make those decisions, and who makes those decisions on a regular basis. This official then confirmed and reiterated that we had received approval in a phone conversation after the announcement was made.

. . . "Like every team, we rely on productive and friendly working relationships at all levels of NASCAR. Unfortunately, NASCAR leadership's handling of this situation now threatens to strain our relationships and places us in an incredibly awkward position, yet again."

It's hard not to surmise from both these statements that lawyers are working on the matter as we speak. It sounds to me as though there is written confirmation of a sponsorship approval from NASCAR, as both Brown and Koutoulas refer to it. In that case, the legal principles behind both the Brown and Koutoulas strategies would at least be tortious interference by NASCAR with a contract between Brown and Koutoulas, as well as bad faith. Bad faith in turn would allow punitive damages. In fact, "Joe Blow was not authorized to approve that deal", which is essentially NASCAR's position in public statements, is a standard bad faith tactic.

In addition, NASCAR has historically approved political sponsorships, including BLM but also Trump 2020, as the photo at the top of this post indicates. The problem for NASCAR is that their choices look arbitrary.

On top of that, Koutoulas has strongly implied, and Brown has implied more subtly, that they will create a public relations firestorm for NASCAR. The first upcoming NASCAR event is the Daytona 500 on February 19-21, a little over a month away. It will be interesting to see what sorts of chants emerge from the stands then.

My wife, a retired attorney, thinks both NASCAR's inside and outside counsel have been AWOL. Get out the popcorn.