Friday Morning. 24 hours before the start of the 1996 Hill Climb..
Friday Morning. 24 hours before the start
of the 1996 Hill Climb..
A week prior to the 1996 Hill Climb, we found out from Bill Pound, the event organizer, that only 49 cars were registered and we would not be getting the decals to put on the top of the windshield of our cars and doors like we did the year before. Wayne, Sal, and I thought this was a real bummer, because it is kinda fun to cruise around acting like a wanna-be racer. I went down do the local graphics shop, and order up some decals with our names on it.
Then we got to thinking about what if we got a three foot logo of our companies name on the car, to make it look like a race car. I printed out the Microsoft logo on the laser printer in about a 300 point font, and it looked like this:
Ron, (an 18 year old guy who works for Wayne), heard about this and said, "No dude, what you need is a six foot long logo that wraps around your hood at and angle, and tails off on the side of your car." Wayne and I looked at each other, and we said, "Hummmm…..you got a point there Ron." We then called Sal, and told him, "Sal, are you willing to throw a big company logo on the hood of your car?". Sal thought about it, and said, "Yeah, that would be kinda cool".
Wayne buys and sells used phone systems (714) 843-9999 to small businesses that don't want to pay retail. He went over to a graphics shop, traded a phone system for a bunch of decals and logos. My wife and I looked through some magazines, and looked at Jeff Zwart's 911 Turbo that he won Pike's Peak with last year, and said, "hummmm…checkout his decals/paint scheme. Dagmar then said she could do better. My car was at the shop, so I asked Wayne, "old buddy, old pal", why don't you drop your car off for the evening, we need a car to model some potential decals on. Wayne's NSX is immaculate, and he whined at first, but I told him we would be real careful with the scotch tape. We started with some mockups of a checked flag coming off the rear fender:
It didn't look quite right.
We looked at Jeff's Zwart's 911 again, and thought that his blue and red color scheme looked kinda cool, so we did another mockup:
Again, it didn't look quite right. But, we agreed that yellow and orange would flames would do the trick. In the meantime, after I pickup my car at the dealer, it dies on me, so I have the car trailered back to the dealer, where I find out that I have to have the motor pulled and I have 12 bent intake valves due to the new timing chain slipping. And this is the day before I am to leave for the Hill Climb.
Hoping for the best, the night before the Hill Climb, the wife and I get permission from the South Coast Acura to work in the service area at night to put on the decals, hoping they can piece the engine and car back together tomorrow. The car started out looking like this:
We laid out all our graphics stuff in the service area, and Dagmar started cutting away with her flame design:
To put the logo on the hood, you first tape the logo to the car. Then you cut between each letter, keeping the top part of the decal backing intact. Then you put soapy water on the car, peel the letter off, and take a rubber spatula like device and push all the bubbles and water out from under the decal:
End result is this:
And this:
Next to Wayne's car with same type of logos:
Next to Sal's 911 Carrera 2 with logos
