G. Chambers Williams III

cwilliams1@tennessean.com

Robert "Robb" Sexton and his company, NeXovation, have big plans for the dormant Nashville Superspeedway.

His goal is to turn the track near Lebanon into a "52-weeks-a-year" operation providing "hundreds of people with living-wage jobs."

But there's a lot of mystery about the 60-year-old Sexton, the inventor of an innovative "Flatwire" technology, who has no experience in the motor sports business. Questions abound, including: Who is he? Where is his money coming from? And how, with no motor sports background, can he expect to turn around a business that couldn't survive under an operator with decades of experience running tracks like Dover Motorsports?

"I can't disclose it all now," Sexton said during an interview last week at the modest NeXovation headquarters in a warehouse park off Harding Place in Antioch. "We have a definite plan, not just from the perspective of motor sports. But it will definitely remain a motor sports facility, as well as a showcase for our other technologies."

Ultimately, Sexton wants to bring IndyCar and NASCAR racing back to the track — which hasn't hosted a race since 2011 — but he insists that making the facility a success "does not require us to have large racing events."

There's more Sexton wants to do, including other motorsports such as drag racing, along with concerts and automotive testing, for instance. He says his long-term intent is to spend "hundreds of millions" of dollars on additional development at the nearly 1,400-acre site. He's not sure the track needs more seating, he said, even though the current 25,000 capacity has long been criticized as too small for big races.

First, though, Sexton says he's focused on getting financing in line so he can close the deal to buy the track and related property by this fall. He agreed earlier this month to pay $27 million in cash and provide a nearly $20 million letter of credit to Wilson County to buy the facility from Dover.

"We are in the process of finalizing the financing," he said, "We have put some cash down, and we have a good set of investment bankers in Denver. We also are bringing in partners on the project."

He identified the money connection as LoHi Merchant Bank, a Denver-based investment bank and strategic advisory firm. Most of the money to buy the speedway will be borrowed, Sexton said, but there will be cash from the equity partners, as well.

Wilson County still has nearly $20 million in bond debt it incurred to pay for roads, utilities and other improvements along State Route 840 and around the speedway when it was built in 2001. Sexton says the money to pay that back will come from sales and property taxes generated by the facility.

But until then, he said, there will be cash on hand from the partners. He did acknowledge, though, that NeXovation — which has a website showing an array of divisions, products and services — has not actually begun selling any products, and has no income yet.

Flatwire's journey

Sexton and NeXovation's primary business focus is Flatwire, an audio-video-electrical wiring technology that he patented in the mid-1980s but that still has not caught on in the marketplace — and isn't even in production now.

After winning a best-of-show award for the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2004, Sexton began limited distribution of the Flatwire products, which are foil-thin, ribbon-like wires that can be glued to a surface and painted over, making them virtually invisible.

An independent distributor in Henderson, Nev. — Flatwire Solutions LLC — signed on in 2004 to market the wire to home audiovisual customers.

A year later, Sexton sold the rights to Flatwire for 10 years to Atlanta-based Southwire Co., the nation's largest wire producer, and went to work for that company ostensibly to head its new Flatwire division. Southwire was to have developed, manufactured and marketed the wire, paying Sexton royalties on all sales.

Instead, Sexton charged in a 2011 lawsuit filed in Sumner County Chancery Court that Southwire never marketed or sold the product, never paid him any royalties, and fired him.

The lawsuit has since been settled, and Sexton has the rights to Flatwire back in his control. He sued Southwire for a minimum of $500 million over the broken deal, but won't say how much money — if any — he got from the settlement, as the terms were confidential.

Southwire spokesman Gary Leftwich said the company would have no comment on its dealings with Sexton or Flatwire, or discuss the lawsuit settlement.

Sexton, a Washington-area native who has lived in Hendersonville since 1998, also wouldn't say whether any money from the Southwire settlement would be used to fund the purchase of the speedway.

"We are about to relaunch Flatwire," he said, displaying some boxes of inventory he said were recovered from Southwire in the settlement of the suit. A manufacturer is being lined up to resume production, he said, and the company plans to expand Flatwire technology into other applications, including automotive.

Kenneth Login, who owned the Nevada distributor of Sexton's products, Flatwire Solutions, said the technology worked well for audio applications but wasn't suitable for high-definition video.

"Robb told us that Flatwire's component-video cable was good for up to 50 feet, but we found that it would only go about 19 feet before the high-def signal was lost," Login said. " I went from having a business that made me half-a-million dollars a year to being completely broke."

Login sued Sexton and Southwire over the failed venture, but "didn't get much from the settlement," he said. "It's a part of my life I just want to forget."

Sexton, meanwhile, blames Login's issues on Southwire's failure to develop and market the products.

But now that Sexton has the rights to Flatwire under his control again, he said the products are ready to go back on the market. There's a version that can carry regular household electrical current, and it doesn't have to be run inside walls or ceilings, or under floors, eliminating costly installations, he said.

Despite Login's misgivings about the earlier video wiring, he said he still believes in the Flatwire technology and thinks the electrical wiring "has great potential."

"People can run that to kitchen islands without digging up the floor; companies can run it to conference tables in the middle of a room," he said.

"Flatwire is a fabulous idea that has tremendous possibilities," Login said. "But because of its earlier failures in the audiovisual industry, it might have a hard time getting back in the door there."

'I've been a car guy all my life'

How did Sexton make the leap from Flatwire inventor and technology entrepreneur to motor sports? "I've been a car guy all my life," he said.

He owns a souped up '93 Corvette and a Porsche Panamera sedan, and he also made a bid of more than $200 million through NeXovation earlier this year to buy the storied Nürburgring motor sports complex in Germany.

Although he lost to a German company that bid about half what he did, Sexton has challenged the bidding process. He still hopes to prevail in his plans to buy Nürburgring.

Perhaps the German owners didn't take his bid seriously, he said, especially since he had no motor sports experience, and there were some questions about whether he actually had sufficient financing in place to close the deal.

But now that he's buying the Nashville Superspeedway, "I believe they'll be more inclined to look at us," Sexton said.

Neither deal — Nashville nor Nürburgring — is dependent on the other, he said. "We're prepared to do both."

He said he also wants to pump millions of dollars into improvements at Nürburgring, just as he plans to do at the Nashville facility.

"Maybe he can pull it off," said Kevin Barnes, an audio engineer who was a partner with Login in the Nevada Flatwire operation.

"Robb's a nice guy, and a real straight shooter," Barnes said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he now lives. "He's really a genius-type guy. It wasn't his fault what happened at Southwire. Flatwire got bought by Southwire, and then sort of got put on the shelf."

Formula for success

Sexton said that bringing some races back to the Nashville Superspeedway would be nice, but he's not counting on that to make the facility a success.

"Our business model has nothing to do with big race events," he said. "In most of these facilities, a few big events pay for everything. Our model is completely different. We're looking at a consistent 52 weeks a year of generating revenue. That facility was originally based on the idea that a Sprint Cup race would be the major event, but that never happened..

"There is nothing in our business model that requires a big race event like that to be successful," he said. "These boom-and-bust business cycles are hard on local labor. You need people when you need them, but you don't want to pay them when you don't need them. Most of our weeks will not have huge events that suddenly go away."

And even if NASCAR isn't interested in bringing some of its second-tier races back to Nashville, there may be interest from the IndyCar Series, according to news reports last week from Texas.

In a meeting with some motor sports reporters at the Texas Motor Speedway, IndyCar operations chief Derrick Walker said he already has had "one exploratory conversation" with Sexton "to see if there is any interest," according to a report on the website Open Wheel Now.

"We haven't gotten that far into it yet," Walker was quoted as saying. "But to be honest, what we're trying to do right now is look at the schedule we have and say, 'OK, how can we lock these races down for several years and get some consistency in the schedule and add more races down the line?' … But we would like to be there, no doubt about it."

Reach G. Chambers Williams III at 615-259-8076 and on Twitter @gchambers3.