Legendary NASCAR team owners Rick Hendrick and Roger Penske have appealed to a court that they should not be deposed in 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports' lawsuit against the league.

The lawsuit, which has run for more than a year, is likely in its last month with a trial set for December 1 if no settlement can be reached between now and then.

23XI and FRM have achieved some significant wins in court over the last month, making it more likely that NASCAR will return to the table to settle before a full-blown trial, but it remains eminently possible that the case will continue into December.

Penske and Hendrick's motion claims that the information 23XI and FRM are asking of them is largely the same at the information NASCAR asked for earlier in the year, which the court broadly denied access to at the time.

Penske and Hendrick in new legal filing

The motion reads: “In keeping with the adage that ‘no good deed goes unpunished,’ Movants find themselves, quickly and without much warning, in the unenviable position of being offered to give expansive and unnecessary deposition testimony as a result of wrangling between the parties to a lawsuit that should have been settled long before now.

“ … Hendrick and Penske, in view of their decades-long relationship with Jim France, agreed to give limited testimony regarding non-confidential matters at the trial of this case, but in a way that did not force them to ‘take sides’ in this lawsuit – something which both men have made clear that they cannot and will not do.

“That has now morphed into an effort by the Plaintiffs to seek testimony potentially regarding HMS’ and Penske’s highly confidential financial and other business information.”

It further states: “The testimony that Plaintiffs now seek will undermine the entirety of the Court’s decision as related to HMS and PRS and potentially all of the Partiers (or the media or general public) to ‘reverse engineer’ the anonymized team information to back out HMS and PRS in an effort to identify the sources of the other team information.

“To be clear, neither Mr. Hendrick nor Mr. Penske would have agreed to give any testimony under these circumstances. Now they find themselves being used as bargaining chips in this litigation.”