NASCAR 101: Why Are Numbers Not Retired in NASCAR?

Whether it’s professional baseball, basketball or even hockey, numbers are synonymous with our favorite athletes. In a sense, numbers are just as important as the athletes themselves are.

NASCAR is no different, with car numbers among the most recognizable features of the sport, alongside the driver and sponsor of a specific car.

Throughout NASCAR’s storied history, icons including Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon became household names in the sport, as diehard fans associated those names with the number that graced the sheet metal of their stock cars.

However, when it comes to NASCAR drivers retiring, there’s a big difference from how other professional sports leagues handle star athletes calling it a career. NASCAR, unlike teams in the other major sports leagues in the United States, does not retire car numbers when a driver reaches the end of their racing career like other major sports teams retire a player’s jersey number.

Why is that?

For starters, the numbers you see on official stock cars are not individually owned by the race teams themselves. NASCAR takes full ownership of each car number that appears in any of the three national series on any given race weekend.

When it comes down to teams choosing the number that a driver will use for a season, they have a variety of options. In NASCAR, there are a total of 110 car numbers available for race teams with Nos. 00 to 09 and 0 to 99 available for teams to select.

The most unique thing about car numbers is that NASCAR issues the numbers on a year-to-year basis, meaning the teams must apply every year in order to use a specific number.

With the recent death of two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Busch, Richard Childress Racing ultimately decided to pause the use of Busch’s former No. 8 for the foreseeable future, reserving the number for Busch’s son Brexton when he is ready to begin his NASCAR career.

For car owner Richard Childress, this is the second occurrence where one of his teams has had a number change during the season. The other was Childress pulling the No. 3 from the grid following the death of NASCAR Hall of Famer Earnhardt.

In the week that followed Earnhardt’s death, Childress made the decision to change Earnhardt’s No. 3 to the No. 29 moving forward, promoting Kevin Harvick from the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series to fill the vacancy left by Earnhardt.

When Harvick decided to leave RCR at the end of the 2013 season, there were questions involving Childress’ grandson, Austin Dillon, who used the No. 3 as a driver in the lower series.

In the 2014 offseason, it was announced that RCR would officially return the No. 3 back to the Cup ranks, with Dillon as the driver. This was made possible by Childress paying NASCAR for the rights to use the No. 3, despite no other driver having used the number since Earnhardt. Dillon has used that number ever since he entered NASCAR back in 2009, when he made his NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series debut.

In the Modern Era of NASCAR, drivers like Johnson, Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr.  became established stars not just because of their performance on track, but also because of their numbers.

No matter which driver fans decide to cheer for on any given race day, the specific number plays just as big of a role as the driver does. If NASCAR opted to retire car numbers, a lot of the most iconic numbers fans have grown accustomed to seeing would disappear altogether.

Take for instance the numbers of Johnson, Gordon, Earnhardt and Petty. Their numbers alone were recognizable enough in which fans knew precisely which driver was their favorite.

However, if NASCAR were to retire car numbers, fans wouldn’t have a recognizable asset to tie their favorite driver to other than their name. Should NASCAR put this practice in place, retiring the more iconic car numbers driven by Hall of Fame drivers would disappear the fastest due to the legacy behind the number.

While some of the most iconic numbers in NASCAR’s history are still active today, it would be a completely different story if these legendary numbers, which helped grow the legacy of several NASCAR champions, were retired forever.