NASCAR racing numbers

Factual Questions
1

I’ve noticed a proliferance lately of gear emblazoned with the car numbers of noteable NASCAR drivers.
Often each piece sports the car’s colors and the driver’s signature.
Curiously, of the items that I have noticed them on, the most prominent were bttle openers and lighters.

My questions:

  1. Who assigns the number to the driver?
  2. Is it copyrighted (like other corporate logos)?
  3. Who owns the rights? NASCAR, the race team owner, primary team sponsor, the driver or none of the above?

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2

C’mon folks.

Somebody’s gotta know this stuff.

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3

IIRC, the team owner owns the number. Sponsors change, drivers move, etc. We fans tend to associate the driver with the number & it gets wierd the first part of every season when some drivers have changed teams. Somehow I can’t see anybody but Dale Earnhardt in a number 3 in a Winston Cup race, but the number belongs to Childress.

4
  1. Has NASCAR chosen the style/font/typeface of the numbers? They are all very much alike.

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5

Chief,

I wandered all over NASCAR’s website (www.nascar.com) as well as several related sites and could not find a definite answer. But some of the news releases gave me the impression that it might work a bit like the situation with taxi medallions. The numbers seem to change hands and stay in one place until some event that changes drivers/teams/sponsors and then move to another semi-permanent home. So it may be a deal where one “owns” a number that is originally assigned by the governing body, but that number can change ownership. Perhaps the owner can sell it, or loses it by virtue of inactivity. Just WAGS. Now I’m curious, too.

6

My WAG is that the size, font, etc of the number must at least fall within certain bounds in order to make it easily readable by race officials and team spotters - especially the number as painted on the roof of the car/truck. NASCAR isn’t remotely close to being a democracy, after all. It’ll be interesting to see if the France dynasty lasts forever.

NASCAR is getting to be just like the rest of the sports - track owners seem to be doing their best to kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs.