Denny Hamlin didn’t dress it up. Michael Jordan walked into the 23XI Racing shop at Airspeed last week, gathered the No. 23 and No. 45 teams around him, and told them exactly what a six time NBA champion tells anyone who has lost their edge: figure out what you can control, stop worrying about everyone else, and get back to work.
“I think it’s a little bit of both, truthfully,” Hamlin said Saturday morning at New Hampshire Motor Speedway when asked whether Jordan’s visit was a pat on the back or a kick in the rear. “And, again, he’s always a big self-reflection guy. What can you do better? Stop worrying about everybody else.”
A Pop In With Purpose
Jordan’s appearances at the shop are rarely announced in advance, but this one was different. Hamlin said the team knew he was coming, and the timing mattered. With the Cup Series regular season closing out at New Hampshire’s Dollar Tree 301 before the Chase field locks in at Darlington next month, 23XI arrived in Loudon carrying real speed alongside real doubt. Tyler Reddick had already clinched his way into the playoffs. Bubba Wallace had not.
“I think that he always makes surprise pop-ins to the team and we know ahead of time, but I think this was a good time,” Hamlin said. “Just, you know, they were in a little bit of a rut and kind of lost some momentum.”
Jordan bought into what became 23XI Racing ahead of the 2021 season, joining Hamlin and business partner Curtis Polk to field a Cup Series charter built around Wallace, the sport’s only full time Black driver at the time. The team’s name fuses the 23 Jordan wore for most of his career with the 11 Hamlin has carried his entire time in NASCAR. Five seasons later, Jordan owns four Cup rides, and Hamlin has come to describe their partnership as one built on Jordan’s insistence on accountability over sympathy. There was no finger pointing in the meeting at Airspeed, Hamlin said. Jordan wanted to see his people, ask what they could do better, and leave it there.
Wallace’s Qualifying Frustration
The message landed at an awkward moment for Wallace. He turned the third fastest lap of the three car Toyota contingent in Saturday practice and showed strong long run speed, then folded in qualifying to line up 23rd for Sunday’s Dollar Tree 301. His teammate Reddick, by contrast, had been 31st on the speed charts in practice before claiming the pole.
“Just gets old starting from behind,” Wallace said. “(We’re) way better than 14th (in the standings), that’s for sure. It’s just unfortunate we’re having to think about (points). Start losing focus on what you need to do, and things happen.”
Wallace has started outside the top 20 in six of the last nine races, a stretch that followed a stronger spring in which he ran top three in points from EchoPark through Darlington before cooling off. Only Iowa, where he charged from 26th to 12th while leading 35 laps, has offered recent proof that the speed is still there. Loudon’s flat, narrow mile has a reputation for punishing anyone who qualifies poorly, given how difficult passing is there, which raised the stakes on a qualifying session Wallace had circled for weeks.
“We revamped our weekend plans since Iowa to do mock qualifying and practice, and felt like we learned a little bit, but it still didn’t translate to much speed,” Wallace said. “This place has got our number right now, and I’m looking forward to the test tomorrow. Not throwing in the towel, just frustrated. I may sound worse than what we are, but it just feels like we haven’t made any progress, which is unfortunate because this was the one that we worked so hard on. We threw all of our resources and efforts into this one, and before anyone creates headlines where Bubba’s giving up, that’s not the case. I can be frustrated at how we’re qualifying. It’s just one of these things that we haven’t figured out yet.”
Reddick’s Pole and the Teammate Pact
Reddick was just as puzzled by his own result, given how far off the pace the No. 45 Toyota had looked in practice. His fifth pole of the season came from a car that, by his own account, shouldn’t have been fast enough to win it.
“That’s what having teammates is all about, working together, helping each other out,” Reddick said. “It’s probably gonna sound crazy, but the guy starting first is gonna be really leaning on these teammates to figure out what to do. We got plenty of things to discuss and figure out. It’s a confidence boost, right? It’s like, OK, well, we know we can at least get it right.”
That exchange, Reddick chasing answers from a teammate who qualified worse than he did, captures what Jordan was pushing for in the meeting room days earlier. The gap between the two cars isn’t about equipment. It’s about whichever driver figured something out on a given Saturday sharing it before Sunday.
The Owner Who Checks In Daily
Jordan’s involvement with 23XI has never looked like a celebrity investment that stops at the checkbook. Drivers across the organization, including Craftsman Truck Series regular Corey Heim, have described getting personal text messages from Jordan checking on their mindset before a race weekend even begins, a habit that mirrors the way he ran locker rooms in his playing days. It is less about strategy calls and more about making sure the person behind the wheel has the right mindset before Sunday.
That approach has shaped how Hamlin and Polk run the business side of the operation, too. A preseason meeting between Jordan and Hamlin ahead of the 2026 campaign reportedly featured what Hamlin called a lot of looking in the mirror by everybody, a review of what worked and what didn’t the year before. It set a tone that carried into the season, one where 23XI built a reputation as one of the sport’s most talked about organizations both for its on track speed and its willingness to challenge NASCAR’s charter system in court. Through all of that noise, Jordan’s message to his race teams has stayed consistent: results matter, but so does how you carry yourself when things aren’t going your way.
That consistency is part of why the Airspeed visit meant more than a simple pep talk. Jordan wasn’t there to diagram a fix for Wallace’s qualifying laps or Reddick’s practice speed. He was there to remind two teams that had built their season on faster starts than finishes that the standard he expects hasn’t moved, and that the only way through a rut is the same self-examination he demanded of himself for 15 NBA seasons.
What Comes Next
Reddick’s playoff seed is already locked in, and his pole gives 23XI a car capable of contending for the regular season’s final win. Wallace’s path is murkier. He is likely to make the Chase field on points even with a quiet Sunday at Loudon, but a team that spent a full week’s resources chasing speed at a track it circled in advance, only to qualify 23rd, is not the story Jordan wants heading into the postseason.
Wallace, for his part, said he has other outlets for the frustration that don’t involve rewriting a program overnight.
“Good music. The heavier, the better,” he said. “Call the wife and kiddos. Vent to her. Think that she’ll have the magical fix, and we’ll just re-rack them tomorrow.”
It’s a smaller admission than anything Jordan said in that shop meeting, but it points to the same idea. Fix what you can control, lean on the people around you, and don’t let one bad qualifying lap become the whole story. Whether that translates into a top 10 at Loudon or simply a steadier finish to the regular season, 23XI heads into the Chase with a legend reminding them the standard hasn’t changed, even with a hard few weeks behind them.
