Amateur Racing Bling: Car Badges and Dash Plaques
Mostly I write about similarities I find between simulated motorsports and the real thing, but sometimes I just can’t find one. When you finish a sim practice, qualify session and race, all you have to show for your effort is MAYBE the congratulations from friends for a race run well. In amateur motorsports back in the day, … you got BLING even if you joined a car club or just entered an event!!!
Unfortunately, a bit of automotive decoration that has no sim racing counterpart, and indeed seems sadly to have gone completely out of style is the Car Club Badge. Sometimes these badges were stamped steel, others were cast in brass or aluminum, and the club’s name or logo would be enameled on or applied as a decal. Unfortunately, if mounted on the front of a car, the pounding of dirt and salt kicked up by other cars would attack the paint so many owners mounted them on the back. The badges for marque clubs of British makes, such as the MG T Series Registry or the Triumph Owners Club were very common. I'm sure that the Porsche Club of America (PCA) has a car badge but I can't recall ever seeing on on a car. Porsche owners seem more drawn to the 2 inch round decal affixed to a side or rear window, as if the owners were proud members of PCA, but wanted to be somewhat discreet about it, unlike the owner of the MG-TD that appears at the beginning of this article.
I remembered owning 2 badges from The Wing and Bonnet Sports Car Club, one of the clubs I belonged to, but when I went looking, I found three of them. I suppose if left alone in a drawer for a long enough period of time, they mate.
My own bling collection began a long time ago. I started working as a mechanic in the early 1970’s at a small Checker and International Harvester dealership in New Jersey, but soon moved on lured by more money … and the prospect of not working on agricultural implements and other large heavy, dirty things. The next step in my automotive career led to a VW dealership, the front windows of which were ablaze in red letter with the out-the-door of a new VW Beetle: $1,495, which is pretty dam cheap for a nice new car. This dealership was within walking distance of Fort Monmouth which, at the time, was the US Army’s Communications Command Center which meant that we had lots of customers for new cars and maintenance and repairs on old ones. I was one of 18 mechanics working away on punch bugs as they were know at the time.
The $1,495 sticker price was a huge problem for the guys selling the maintenance and repairs, especially for the older Vdubs that customers brought in for what they thought was routine maintenance and repair. The mechanic would look the car over and put together a laundry list of items suffering from put off repair and deferred maintenance. Now the owner is sadly studying the $800 - $1,000 estimate kinda hard and suddenly he’s looking at the $1,495 sign in the window.
A salesman would know the look and come walking over. After a bit of conversation the salesman and car owner are talking colors and options, and … no … the dealership isn’t interested in taking a 5 or 6 year old Bug that needs a valve job and a clutch, so what are we going to do with the old one? At this point in the transaction, the salesman would come out into the shop and ask in a very loud voice what any of the mechanics would give for the old car, and most times, it wasn’t very much money.
That’s pretty much how I got my first VW, a kinda rusty 1965 Karman Ghia in pale yellow with a black interior. One of the other mechanics had bought it for its engine and trans, I got what was left for the purchase price of two six-packs of Miller Hi-Life, the Champaign of bottled beers, just like it sez in the commercials. Within a week or so I built up a 40 HP 1200 cc engine for it, bought a used transaxle for about 20 bucks, rebuilt the front end, put on new brakes … cleaned out the trash and ash trays and I had my first sports car. Within a couple months, I would do my first autocross on a real race track. Wall Stadium is a ¼ mile banked oval in Wall Township, New Jersey and although it was mostly a home for various stock car races, occasionally the owners would rent the track on a Sunday to a sports car club which would lay out a course with yellow traffic pylons and hold an autocross. That’s where I was and what I was doing on October 20, 1974, and I got the dash plaque to prove it.
I spent this past weekend trying to diagnose what is wrong with my oldest son’s G27 steering wheel (it turns out to be the stepper motors inside), I spent my lunch and breaks looking at slides trying to figure out which crazy old man story I would tell here next. At one point in the process something caught my memory, and I started rootin’ around in old boxes. I was never much for keeping trophies or things to hang on the wall and not much survived my various divorces and other storms of life anyoldways, but I do keep some crazy old man stuff in dusty old crazy old man’s boxes. It didn’t take long and soon I was opening up an old Band-Aid tin box.
Back in the day, if you entered your car into a motor sports event, be it a rally, an autocross or wheel to wheel racing, you’d receive a 1 inch by 3 inch bit of aluminum or plastic called a dash plaque. On this would be embossed or carved the name of the club holding the event, the name of the event and the date it was held. I only have about 30 of them left, and wish I had done more to hang on to the rest.
These were never regarded as participation trophies even given to the bowler who can only roll gutter balls, no, much like the “This-Car-Climbed-Mount-Washington” bumper stickers you’d see on the back bumper of a car here in the US every once in a while, dash plaques were mementos of the car’s participation in a motor sports event, a fine achievement in itself. Curiously, however, I never saw one stuck onto the dashboard of a car. I’m sure that somebody must have done it; I just don’t recall it being done … ever. You were more likely to find dash plaques mounted on the back of a co-driver’s (aka, the rally navigator) clip board. Mine ended up in an old Band-Aid tin. I collect 1/18 diecast model cars and have been working on modifying an MGB roadster into a model of one of my old racers. One day I just might make a display stand for it and tile it with the dash plaques its full sized counterparts acquired.
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