Numbers Game

The 43.  The 3. The mere mention of those numbers give me the chills.  Two icons of the sport, one retired, the other gone to his reward far too soon.  There’s been occasional conversations to the effect that NASCAR should retire those numbers.  Richard Petty famously claimed that there was no reason to retire the 43; after all, he said, “It’s just a number..”  Richard Childress has kept the 3 in his stable of numbers, but doesn’t use it in Cup any more.  I suppose the day will come when we’ll see the 3 in a Cup race again, when the timing is right.

I was under the assumption that NASCAR never retired numbers; turns out I was wrong.  On RaceDay on Speed, they had a feature on Richie Evans, one of this year’s NASCAR Hall of Fame inductees.  Richie drove Modifieds, one NASCAR series that suffers some serious underexposure these days.  The Mods are exciting, when you can catch them on the tube; cars that are nearly all engine with fat racing tires going around a half-mile track kicks racing excitement up a notch. Anyhow, Richie Evans drove the #61 car to 478 wins in the modified series; he was killed in a racing accident at Martinsville Speedway in 1985.  After his death, NASCAR retired the #61 in the Modifieds; to date, that is the only number to be retired in any NASCAR series.

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