Racing Design Blog

What ever happened to Dale Earnhardt's Taz car?

For the 2000 Daytona 500, Dale Earnhardt took to the track in a special #3 car featuring the famous Looney Tunes character Taz. The Taz character was part of a GM Goodwrench advertising campaign at the time. The car featured a red paint scheme with Taz on the hood. The number 3 on the roof was day-glo red, indicating Dale's inclusion in the Winston million dollar promotion. Dale ran well all day in this car but was involved in a late race incident that left him in the 21st position.

After the race, you would think that this car might end up in a museum or on display somewhere. Surely the car's shell would be immortalized in someone's collection? Well, at first, that was not the case. This photo shows the shell of the Taz car behind the race shops of Richard Childress Racing. The car's shell was not sitting in a museum, but was sitting in some tall grass outside the race shop.

That year, the design team at Hasbro was looking for a unique product idea that would bring a part of the race to the fans. The idea was to bring a piece of the actual race car and deliver it to the collectors of Winner's Circle products. The team found out about this piece of NASCAR history wasting away behind the RCR shop and decided to purchase it. The team had the body of the car shipped to its facility in the Cincinnati area and began a process to deliver pieces of the car to the fans. The product was eventually called the Team Authentics Series.

The car was shipped with the entire body in place. No chassis or motor, just the shell, windows and all. The Winner's Circle team disassembled the car and began a complicated process that would divide the sheetmetal into 1 inch squares that would be placed inside Winner's Circle product. The hood, windows, nose, rear and roof flaps were removed and the remaining sheetmetal was used to create the squares. The squares were then placed inside a plastic container and were included with a 1/64th scale diecast with the Taz car paint scheme.

The Team Authentics product was randomly inserted into packages of regular Winner's Circle product in 2001. The series also included other drivers and in addition to sheetmetal, there was a set that included swatches of drivers' uniforms as well. Of all of the Team Authentics pieces, none had more history than the Dale Earnhardt Taz car set. In a way, the Taz car no longer exists, but in another way, it lives on because it is now in the hands of Dale Earnhardt fans everywhere.

Industry Insight: Dale Earnhardt Lifetime Series Part 2

Yesterday we took a look at the first Dale Earnhardt Lifetime Series collection from 1997. Today we will look at the 1998 Dale Earnhardt Lifetime Series collection. The 1998 collection featured 11 cars and paint schemes from Dale's career. The Winner's Circle design team once again came up with some great classic Dale Earnhardt paint schemes for the collection in 1998.

One of the most interesting cars from this set is the famous pink K2 car from Dale's early days on the short tracks. Apparently this car was not meant to be pink, but after painting it, the color turned out that way. Rather than repainting the car, Dale went ahead and drove it with the color pink. This is truly one of the oddest and most interesting car color stories ever and it is featured in the 1998 Lifetime Series.

The 1998 Lifetime Series also included some of Dale's special paint schemes from the Winston. This car features the paint scheme Dale Earnhardt drove in the 1996 Winston. The car celebrated the Olympics which were going to take place in Atlanta that year. The car featured an All-American red, white and blue paint scheme with the Atlanta Olympic logo on the hood. In a bit of history, due to licensing issues, this diecast could not be produced with the official Olympic logo on it, so the car in this series actually features the GM Goodwrench logo on the hood in place of the Olympic logo that actually ran on the car.

The 1998 Lifetime Series featured one more special paint scheme from Dale's participation in the Winston. Dale would run a Bass Pro Shops color scheme in the 1998 Winston and that car was featured here in this series. The Bass Pro Shops sponsorship proved to be a popular one. The team of Earnhardt and Bass Pro Shops was a natural, and the company still sponsors an Earnhardt affiliated car today.

The 1998 Winner's Circle Dale Earnhardt Lifetime Series was a great collection of classic Earnhardt rides. The cars featured in the series that year ranged from Dale's earliest to his most current. Here is a comprehensive list of the cars that were issued in the series for 1998:

# 1 of 11: 1991 Championship GM Goodwrench Lumina

# 2 of 11: 1998 GM Goodwrench Monte Carlo

# 3 of 11: 1982 Wrangler #15 Thunderbird

# 4 of 11: 1994 Championship GM Goodwrench Lumina

# 5 of 11: 1985 Wrangler Monte Carlo

# 6 of 11: 1956 K2 Pink Ford Victoria

# 7 of 11: 1998 Winston Bass Pro Shops Monte Carlo

# 8 of 11: 1993 Championship GM Goodwrench Lumina

# 9 of 11: 1987 Championship Wrangler Monte Carlo

#10 of 11: 1996 Winston Olympics/GM Goodwrench Monte Carlo

#11 of 11: 1988 GM Goodwrench Monte Carlo Fastback

Industry Insight: Dale Earnhardt Lifetime Series Part 1

In today's Industry Insight column I wanted to take a look at the Winner's Circle Dale Earnhardt Lifetime Series. Starting in 1997, Winner's Circle produced an annual set of diecast cars based on many of the different paint schemes Dale Earnhardt drove throughout his hall of fame career. The Winner's Circle design team went to great lengths to insure that these cars were historically accurate each year as they produced this series. Many of these Lifetime Series cars are sought after collectibles, and solid information about each year's sets is sometimes hard to come by.

Today we will take a look at the Dale Earnhardt Lifetime Series from 1997 and provide a complete listing of the cars that were featured that year. The 1997 set featured some well known paint schemes that Dale drove, and a few that were a bit more obscure. One of the most famous from the set was the Silver Monte Carlo that Dale drove in the 1995 Winston. That special paint scheme was the one that launched the special pint scheme craze in NASCAR. This car was #3 in the series for 1997.

Another scheme from the 1997 Lifetime Series featured Dale's first appearance in the #3 for Richard Childress Racing in 1984. The car featured sponsorship from Wrangler and signaled the first time Dale would take to the track with the number that he would be associated with most during his career. The #3 on this car was not the same number style that has since become Dale's signature number, but an earlier version of the famous number. This car was #9 in the 1997 series.

This Lifetime Series car featured the paint scheme that Dale used when he drove the #2 Mike Curb Oldsmobile in 1980. This was one of Dale Earnhardt's earliest rides in NASCAR and depicts a young Dale driving a car number that is not normally associated with him.This car was the 4th in the 1997 series.

The 1997 series consisted of 12 different cars, along with a bonus car that featured Dale's first stock car series car, a 1975 Dodge featuring the number 8.

Here is a comprehensive list of the cars from the 1997 Winner's Circle Dale Earnhardt Lifetime Series.

# 1 of 12: 1997 GM Goodwrench Monte Carlo

# 2 of 12: 1996 AC Delco #3 Monte Carlo raced in Japan

# 3 of 12: 1995 GM Goodwrench Silver Select

# 4 of 12: 1980 Mike Curb Oldsmobile

# 5 of 12: 1997 Wheaties Monte Carlo

# 6 of 12: 1978 Monte Carlo #98

# 7 of 12: 1988 ASA GM Goodwrench Camaro

# 8 of 12: 1981 Wrangler Pontiac #2

# 9 of 12: 1984 Wrangler Monte Carlo #3

#10 of 12: 1986 Championship Wrangler Monte Carlo

#11 of 12: 1989 Busch Series Lowe's Foods Pontiac

#12 of 12: 1990 GM Goodwrench Lumina

Bonus Car: 1975 #8 Dodge

Industry Insight: NASCAR Products Industry in 1997

In today's Industry Insight I wanted to take a look at the the days when NASCAR was just emerging as a viable licensed product in the marketplace. In the early to mid 1990's, the NASCAR products market began to take off. The sport began to experience more widespread popularity and the sales of NASCAR related products began to spread away from the tracks and into the retail mainstream.

The images featured today are from the Official NASCAR Retail Guide from 1997. The NASCAR market had really begun to take off by 1997 and the design of products was coming of age. The country had noticed NASCAR and started buying products like crazy. In this apparel image you get a look at what type of design was popular in 1997. The designs were a bit simpler than those of today and feature the drivers who were dominating the track at the time. It is a real blast from the past to see these old school designs again.

In this next image you get a great look some really classic novelty designs. I love seeing the Chad Little seat cushion, the Sterling Marlin binder and the Geoff Bodine license plate. In many ways it seems like a ton of time has gone by since some of these guys were on the track, though it really wasn't all that long ago. The sport has evolved so much and has added so many new young drivers that it gives you a great feeling seeing these items featuring some of those old school drivers. Wouldn't you love to have one of those Cartoon Network car notepad sets?

In the final image of the day, we get a good look at what the NASCAR collectibles world looked like in 1997. It was definitely much less sophisticated in 1997 than it is today. Who can forget those early Racing Champions die-cast cars?  Those trading cards are a great look into the past as well. Both of those markets were just beginning to take shape in 1997. The product offerings of today are drastically different than those of 1997. I'm sure many of you have a few of these gems still lingering around your collections!

The NASCAR products business is a major player in the world of sports licensed products in 2009. Everywhere you go you see people wearing NASCAR products and have no trouble finding them at retail. In 1997, the industry was just getting ready to take off and these old school catalog images bring back those memories of the moments that this great sport began to emerge from the South and win the country over.

Industry Insight: NASCAR Paint Scheme development

In today's column, I want to give you an inside look at the process used in developing a special paint scheme promotion for a NASCAR race. In 1999, while working with Hasbro and Winner's Circle I had the opportunity to be involved in a multi-car paint scheme project promoting a brand that Hasbro was working on.

Fox Kids and NASCAR were developing a cartoon show for children, using NASCAR racing as its theme. The show featured futuristic cars  racing on out-of-this-world tracks. That show was titled NASCAR Racers. Hasbro was involved in the project designing toys that would go along with the show. In the early stages of the show's development, we had the opportunity to assist with the design of the logo for the show and the looks of some of the cars in the show. To give it a true NASCAR feel, each character in the show needed a recognizable paint scheme, logo style, sponsor and number style. I was able to design the paint scheme that adorned the car for the character of Flyer.

As a way to promote the show, there was a program developed to showcase the show on the track at a Winston Cup event. The program called was to include four different cars all running paint schemes related to the show. This was still in the early days of the special paint scheme craze and marked the first time that a special paint promotion was used across multiple cars. The teams involved in the project early on were Jeff Gordon's #24, Bobby Labonte's #18 and Terry Labonte's #5. Finding a fourth team to participate proved a little challenging, due to the many sponsor commitments all of the teams had. The final car in the program was the #55 Andy Petree machine with driver Kenny Wallace.

The cars were going to be designed to look like the paint schemes of the four main hero characters in the show. Each car was assigned a character and I began the process of blending those designs on to the NASCAR bodies. The hoods featured the show's logo and the characters from the show. The character represented on the car was featured prominently in the group on each hood.

Working with four teams presented many challenges with approvals as the process moved along. The designs had to be approved by Hasbro's team, the team at Fox Kids, and each of the teams who were participating in the program. This was an interesting process to go through as nobody had tried a promotion across this many teams before.

The cars were scheduled to run at the Homestead Miami Speedway at the end of the 1999 season.  To debut the cars, NASCAR arranged a special unveiling at the track a few days before the race. Each of the drivers were on hand as each of the cars were unveiled to the public. It was a great event with lots of excitement. I can't really express how great it feels to see your own design work appear at an event like this. The hard work on the project proved to be very rewarding. In addition to the unveiling, the track had invited a large group of children from the Miami area to come and see the first public screening of the NASCAR Racers movie on a large theater screen in the infield of the track.

I can't put into words the feelings I had on race day when I saw the cars on the grid and running in the race. It was a truly rewarding experience and one I will never forget. It was an incredible weekend topped off by a great race day. Bobby Labonte nearly took one of the cars to Victory Lane that day, narrowly losing to Tony Stewart. In addition to the NASCAR Racers cars running, this was also the day the veteran driver Dale Jarrett won the Winston Cup title, leading to another celebration I will never forget.

I hope I've been able to give you some unique insight into how a paint scheme design project unfolded. As we go along, I will have  some more stories about how some of your favorite products were designed and will give you more "Industry Insight".