“To retire or not to retire” - The debate over the #3 still continues

Before you read this article I want to make it perfectly clear to all of you that I was, and still am, a Dale Earnhardt fan.

With that being said I am approaching this with an open mind and with an unbiased opinion - as much as there is to give anyway.

It would seem that a little ol’ fanpost written by our up-and-comer-writer-in-training, Athletic, has sparked a bit of debate about retiring numbers in NASCAR - especially the #3!

Now with me being an avid Dale Earnhardt fan I would love for his number to be retired, but let’s think about this for a minute, is this really reasonable?

Yes! And ... well ... no, not really.

You see numbers are owned by the car owners not the driver, unless you are a owner driver like Tony Stewart with his soon to be famed #14.

That famed slanted white number 3 with red trim is owned by Richard Childress, in fact he drove with that style of number before Earnhardt did.

Car numbers are not like jersey numbers. Dale Earnhardt drove cars with numbers of 2, 15, & 3 among others while Wayne Gretzky had the number 99 his whole pro career. There’s a difference here. The car number is tied to the car owner/sponsor not the driver where as the jersey number is the other way around, that is why Tony Stewart didn’t take the 20 with him when he left JGR, it was owned by JGR and tied in with the sponsor Home Depot.

Now granted just because a number has been tied in with a sponsor doesn’t mean it can move when the sponsor leaves, not so. In the last 15 years the sponsor Budweiser has been on cars numbered 11, 25, 8, and 9 because they don’t own the number either - its the car owners and they’re not giving up those numbers too easily.

I understand that and respect it, and then there is the fact that there are only 110 numbers ( 0-99, 00-09) available to race with because there are no triple digits allowed and if you start retiring numbers then you’re eventually going to run out of numbers. Granted it would take a while, but the possibility is there.

So what do you do to honour some famous drivers who drove to fame with a number that eventually became as famous as them making them intrinsically tied to each other like Earnhardt and the #3?

Retire the number I say ... well not the number exactly but the trademarked number style. I think they should retire the version of the number but not the number itself.

So what would happen in Earnhardt’s case would be that NASCAR would retire the RCR version of the fiercely thrusted white and red number three that was synonymous with Earnhardt while still allowing the number to be used in a differently designed way other than the RCR version that Earnhardt made famous as he became more famous himself.

Now RCR would still technically own their version of the number 3 that was retired so they could still capitalize on any profit that might be made from it through souvenir/memorabilia sales. And once that version of the number is retired then RCR could still use the number three on their car they could race again. That means that Richard could give the number to his grandson as long as it is a differently designed one compared to the Earnhardt one.

This would hold true for any number being retired whether its Petty’s 43, Johnson’s 48, or Gordon’s 7.