NASCAR suspended Evanna Howell indefinitely on Wednesday, May 27, after listing the 35-year-old team member in its weekly penalty report for what the sanctioning body called a behavioral incident. Court records in Cabarrus County show Howell had been arrested three days earlier, and the suspension landed while the case was still unfolding.
The arrest warrant alleges that Howell used a golf cart to assault a man at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Saturday, May 23. A Concord police report said the man was 77 years old and suffered a severe laceration. Court records show Howell was charged with assault with a deadly weapon causing serious injury, then released from the Cabarrus County jail on May 26 after posting a $125,000 bond.
Howell’s LinkedIn identifies her as a senior account manager for 23XI Racing, the team co-owned by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin, and says she has worked there since 2021. The incident came during the same weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway that drew the arrest records, tying the penalty directly to one of NASCAR’s busiest tracks and to a team in the middle of the sport’s competition calendar.
The friction point is that NASCAR moved quickly to punish Howell but has not said anything publicly about the underlying facts beyond the behavioral label in its report. 23XI Racing also had not responded as of the article’s writing, leaving the arrest warrant, the police report and the sanction report to carry the story on their own. The gap matters because Howell is not an anonymous name in a filing; she is a senior account manager for one of NASCAR’s most visible teams, and the discipline now reaches beyond the court record into the sport’s daily operations.
For now, the clearest answer is that NASCAR is treating the case as serious enough to remove Howell from the sport indefinitely while the legal process continues. What happens next will depend less on the penalty report than on whether the criminal case advances and whether 23XI Racing says anything about her status.
