While NASCAR fans have grown accustomed to hearing about the lawsuit with 23XI Racing and Front Motorsports suing the sanctioning body over antitrust claims, they were hit with a pair of legal news items last week — Legacy Motor Club suing Rick Ware Racing over a charter and Dale Earnhardt Jr. in a legal dispute with Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson over a trademark with the No. 8.
On Tuesday’s “Dale Jr. Download” podcast, the NASCAR Hall of Famer shed some light on what happened with the No. 8 trademark by providing a timeline of events.
“So we learned that the Budweiser No. 8 trademark is not gonna be continued and renewed by Teresa and we were a bit surprised by that because she kept the No. 1 trademark,” Earnhardt said. “Haven't talked to Teresa. Don't know why that was her decision. But we saw an opportunity to pick up the number to see if we could get the trademark.
“Without the trademark, we can run the number. Anyone can. We can use the number no problem. Did we have a trademark for the current No. 8 JR Motorsports number that we've been running since 2019? No, there was no trademark for that number. So we filed for the Bud No. 8 trademark.
“We have successfully succeeded in that process. We also, as a backup plan, filed for the trademark on the JR Motorsports No. 8 that Josh Berry and all those guys have been running for the last couple years. That was sort of a plan B because we assumed that this Bud No. 8 thing might get murky or might not even happen at all. And so we filed for the other number.
"When we're like, as I said, we're sort of right on top of the finish line in closing out the trademark rights for the Bud No. 8, and in doing that, at some point we would probably abandon the application for the JR Motorsports No. 8. We just hadn't done that.
“Well, I learned on social media about the same time as everybody else did that Lamar was contesting our trademark application. He wasn't suing me. He's just contesting it. And there's a part of the trademark process where if you believe somebody's applying for a trademark and it's going to hurt your brand, you can oppose it, right? And say, ‘Hey, I need this. I need y'all to look at this first.’ And what happens is our application for our trademark would stop and the board would check out what Lamar's concerned about and agree or disagree. And then the process would then pick up and continue.
"Well, when I learned about it, I thought for sure it was over the Bud No. 8. But when I dug into it, I learned that it was that JR Motorsports font and we weren't ever gonna use that again. Ever. And so after some conversations with Kelley and our team, they're like, yeah, we're gonna abandon that.
"And, so yeah, it's not an issue. It's a non-issue. The next day actually we filed the paperwork to abandon the acquisition of that trademark for the JR Motorsports No. 8. We got what we wanted and we're down the road. I was not gonna argue with Lamar over something that I didn't plan on using and I wasn't gonna spend thousands of dollars with my lawyers to fight for something that I didn't need.”
