A window into NASCAR owner’s finances through divorce filing

Information about the complex asset division that took place during the divorce of NASCAR chairman Brian France has recently become public. The documents from the 2007 divorce were unsealed by the court only recently, exposing previously private information to public scrutiny. NASCAR is a privately held company that Mr. France began leading after his father passed away in 2003.

The documents show the division of multiple homes, cars, boats, and other holdings that he shared with his wife, who he married originally in 2001 and divorced from in 2004, but remarried in 2005 and had two children together before divorcing for a second time.

This case shows the value of sealing divorce records from public view for high-asset and prominent couples. Even if eventually the records do become public, making efforts to shield them while the process continues can be important for maintaining normalcy at work and at home. In some cases, maintaining private records is also essential to protect business interests which may be negatively impacted by public exposure.

In this situation, the NASCAR executive had some particularly complex issues based on the fact that he remarried his ex-wife. When couples choose to do this, it is important to take the legal aspects of the first divorce into consideration while figuring out asset division issues for the second divorce. Since children were only a factor during the second divorce, child support was not an issue that carried over from the first settlement agreement.

While most Las Vegas divorce cases do not involve this level of public attention, it is clear that many high-asset individuals can benefit from keeping divorce records private.

Source: USA Today, “Divorce reveals details of Brian France’s finances,” May 8, 2013.