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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: NASCAR Wins by Car Number, Part Three
Gregg Leary asks... Is One The Loneliest Number?... Three digit numbers were not uncommon in NASCAR’s early years... especially at races where the car count was high...
Gregg Leary  |  Posted February 08, 2009   Charlotte, NC
A hand painted NASCAR inspection certificate on a vintage stock car. (Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images)
Gregg Leary is a researcher/writer for Wind Tunnel with Dave Despain on SPEED. (Photo: SPEED)

Three digit numbers were not uncommon in NASCAR’s early years... especially at races where the car count was high...like the Daytona Beach & Road Course. Letters would also be added sometimes as “prefixes” or “suffixes” to numbers. Fractions were even used on occasion. (Thank Goodness They Didn’t Use Roman Numerals.)

A prime example would be some of the 54 starters in the 1951 Daytona Beach & Road Course race:

41½: Bill Blair
144X: Len Fanelli
138: Clyde Minter
101: Bucky Sager
188: Don Oldenberg
2B: Jack Smith
81A: Pappy Hough
110: Jim Fiebelkorn
139: Ray Thompson
94A: Joe Rogers
25A: Jimmy Thompson
111: Herschel Buchanan

CUP: NASCAR Wins by Car Number, Part One
CUP: NASCAR Wins by Car Number, Part Two

Although many of the early NASCAR records are incomplete, the first example I could find of a three digit number used in a NASCAR Cup race was at Heidelberg Speedway in 1949 where Clarence Burris ran the #111. The first letter/number combination was the N5 of Ray Erickson at Langhorne in 1950. The first fractional number was Bill Blair in the 41 ½ at Hillsboro, NC in 1950.

The “Jr.” suffix was used by Johnny Mantz when he won the first Southern 500 in 1950 in the #98 Jr. George Seeger ran the #2 Jr. at Gardena, CA in 1951. (Richard Petty drag raced his Plymouth Barracuda #43 Jr. when Chrysler boycotted NASCAR in 1965.) The highest three digit number I found was the #888 driven by Iggy Katona at West Palm Beach in 1952. In 1962 at Hickory, NC, John Hamby drove a Ford simply “numbered” as “X.” (Was he using a Roman Numeral?)

Strangely, the 1951 Southern 500 had 82 starters…all with single or double digit numbers…ranging from Jimmie Lewallen’s #0 to Billy Myers’ #99.

The 1963 Daytona 500 seemed to offer an alternative to three digit numbers. The field of 50 cars had 8 cars that had a “zero’ in the prefix. The 0, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06 and 07. With the 00, 08 and 09, 11 more one or two digit numbers were freed up for use.


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