23XI Racing - Airspeed HQ

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. - Denny Hamlin wanted 23XI Racing's new headquarters to be different and a major leap forward for new NASCAR team facilities. He also wanted the details to matter, and the 43-year-old driver — a team co-founder with friend, associate and NBA legend Michael Jordan — saw to those details personally.

The greenery hanging above the lounge area in the team's break room? Hamlin spent hours placing them, at the cost of an aching back. The 45 Air Jordan shoes arranged to form the No. 23 in a meeting-room wall display? All are extras that Hamlin pulled from his storage. The tiles, wood and other surfaces - down to the choice of laminate style in the bathroom stalls? Hamlin sorted through scads of samples and swatches to find the right fit.

"I wanted it to feel like the Google of race shops," Hamlin said during a tour last week, and indeed there's a Silicon Valley feel to the 114,000-square-foot building. But "race shop" is not what those involved are calling it, since that almost downplays what the place is aiming to achieve. And if there were a version of a "race shop" swear jar at the front desk in the lobby - the one with the bespoke elephant-print backdrop plucked from the Jordan Brand color palette looming behind it — it wouldn't seem out of place.

With those ground rules understood Airspeed opened its doors to the public [in May 2024], welcoming fans and giving them a glimpse at the operations involved with one of stock-car racing's growing teams. When the organization launched in 2020, the team's name was a composite of Jordan's uniform — No. 23 — and Hamlin's car — No. 11 — the latter stylized in Roman numeral form. The name of the headquarters - coined by longtime Jordan business manager Curtis Polk - is also an amalgam, combining Jordan's "Air" nickname with Hamlin's on-track speed.

"This is not a race shop. It's a place that we work, yes, we put cars on the track, but it's so much more than that," Hamlin says. "Would you say sitting right here, we're in a race shop? No, it certainly doesn't feel that way. So I think what we were in — in Mooresville, in the old Germain (Racing) building — was a race shop and a garage. This is not. This is something that is different, and so it needs to be named appropriately."

The unique name and surroundings seem to fit for a team born on the cusp of the sport's Next Gen era. Hamlin went to work in 2021 with the first concept sketches of what the organization's new home might look like. Working with Charlotte-based design firm Merriman Schmitt Architects and Choate Construction, the first walls went up just over a year ago. Facing and meeting a firm deadline of Jan. 1, the team remarkably moved in eight months later to prepare for the season.