Ferko lawsuit

Ferko, et al. v. National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc., et al., commonly known as the Ferko lawsuit, was an American lawsuit between plaintiff Francis Ferko, a resident of Plano, Texas and a minor shareholder of the publicly traded Speedway Motorsports, Inc. (SMI), and defendants NASCAR and International Speedway Corporation (ISC), which are both owned by the France family. Ferko, a racing fan not associated with the executive management team of SMI, contended that the defendants violated antitrust laws in preventing SMI's Texas Motor Speedway from obtaining a promised second NASCAR NEXTEL Cup race per racing season. The suit was filed in February 2002, and was settled out of court in May 2004. The settlement delivered a second Sprint Cup race each season to the track, but also resulted in numerous other changes to the NASCAR schedule of races and racing venues.

As the case was preparing to go to trial in 2004, the parties settled the lawsuit as part of a larger restructuring of NASCAR's schedule. In the settlement, ISC sold the North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham (now known as Rockingham Speedway) to Speedway Motorsports, but Rockingham's one NEXTEL Cup race (which had been held in February) was moved to ISC's Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California. Continuing with NASCAR's schedule realignment, Texas earned its promised second race (the reason for the lawsuit) when a November race, used for the prestigious Southern 500 (renamed the Dickies 500 in Texas), was moved to Texas from ISC's Darlington Raceway. As it happens, the November date had been inherited by Darlington from Rockingham only a year earlier, when Rockingham had been reduced from two NEXTEL Cup races to one. The November date gave Texas a race in the Chase for the Nextel Cup and cost Darlington the more prestigious of its two race dates. For its part, SMI had to agree that Rockingham would be used only for non-competition NASCAR uses, such as for movie settings about the sport or for testing. As a result of a 2006 NASCAR testing rule change limiting testing on tracks used for NASCAR competition, testing at Rockingham has become more commonplace. SMI sold off the Rockingham track in 2007.

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