More recently, a variational approach has been proposed by Lin and Wang for damping motion with a Lagrangian holding the energy term dissipated by a fric-tion force. However, the modified Euler-Lagrange equation obtained within their for-malism leads to an incorrect Newtonian equation of motion due to the nonlocality of the Lagrangian. In this communication, we generalize this approach based on the frac-tional actionlike variational approach and we show that under some simple restric-tions connected to the fractional parameters introduced in the fractional formalism, this problem may be solved.