Jack Brooks wrote (referring to the URL below):
>
> > > http://www.fot-racing.com/
> If you like it better, I vote keep it. It's a striking logo either way.
>
> Jack (wondering where I can see a full explanation of all the signal flags)
> Brooks
Ah. Sounds like my time to chime in.
The yellow flag with red stripes is the debris flag, typically used to
denote (among other things) oil on the racing surface. The blue flag
with the diagonal stripe (sometimes white, but often yellow) is the
passing flag, used to indicate to a competitor that a faster car is
coming up behind.
In 1990, I proposed just such a logo (flags only) for Fizzball Racing,
the team with which I was participating in SCCA competition. (Actually,
during 1990 I was a crew member and prep mechanic for Fizzball; I didn't
start driving till 1991.) The two flags are a natural for a team of
low-budget racers with exclusively British road-race cars (thereby
excluding the circle-track division of Fizzball Racing, which is still
competing in Camaros and is now beginning to achieve some success in the
Pacific Northwest). Basically -- given the legendary propensity of
British cars to leak anything and everything from bean oil to smoke from
electrical components (and a similar propensity to leak various bodily
fluids by Fizzball Racing drivers, on occasion), and given our novice
status and perennially empty bankbooks at the time, Fizzball Racing
adopted the oil flag and the passing flag as the two flags we were most
likely to see in any given race. Our logo was in fact the crossed oil
flag and passing flag, and it brought back many memories (some of them
even pleasant!) to see them on the URL listed above.
We had T-shirts made with these logos in 1990 and again in 1991,
including at least one batch in long-sleeved white cotton for use by
corner workers and/or in marque club track events that require
long-sleeved cotton shirts. These were distinct from the traditional
Fizzball colors of black and hot pink, required on the cars at least
somewhere. I think the only example I have on line of a Fizzball Racing
car is my EP MGB in the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca (Labor Day weekend,
1991), located here:
http://www.living-history.org/classics/cscrew.jpg
Can't really see the pink much -- it's the air dam.
These days, the only people I usually see wearing Fizzball T-shirts are
my daughters, who love to wear them (as well as any other of Dad's big,
comfy T-shirts) as nightgowns. But I think it's essential for the list
to understand not only the meaning of the two flags in the logo, but
also some of the tradition behind them, at least in San Francisco and
Oregon regions of the SCCA. And more important, you should know why you
may get some *very* interesting comments from old-time race stewards if
you show up with those two flags crossed on a T-shirt in SFR and
Oregon.
I'm proud to see that the idea I came up with a decade ago was so good
that someone else came up with it independently, and I hope the oil flag
stays on the FOT logo. :-)
--Scott Fisher
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