Lucio Bros. Racing: 1993-1997

What a lot of people who knew me at the time didn't realize, is I'd always loved "stock car" (what I later learned was "NASCAR") racing, even as a kid. I remember one time wanting a particular Easter basket just because of all the others, this lone specific one had an ERTL diecast of a Nascar in it. I guess this would have been about 1982 or 1983, and those were somewhat hard to come by then. At any rate I was so excited when the Easter Bunny came through that I promptly called up my cousin - at 5am. My parents didn't even know I could use the phone or knew his number! So I was grounded, and that toy stock car I had so coveted was taken from my clutches for good. Boo.

Growing up I'd catch the random odd glimpse or accidental bit on TV, but those were sparse odds. Nascar wasn't followed in Chicago and I had no idea when to even try to stalk the TV; meanwhile the times we went to the now-defunct Santa Fe Speedway in the SW Chicago suburbs were cherished. So when copies of the annual Official Nascar Preview and Press Guide suddenly appeared in Chicago newsstands in 1993 - complete with schedules, biographies, and a historic rundown of who raced what for whom and when... it seemed to all my friends as if I went off the deep end. FINALLY! I could make sense of it all! Nascar's push into Chicago was no accident, as the whole country was blanketed with new exposure to the (no longer "stock" car) circus. A local family fun (mini-golf, arcades, etc) center even opened a brand new figure-8 go-kart track - with karts painted as replicas of current Winston Cup cars. From that point on my friends, brother and I hovered over the place like ghosts. Cheap diecast replicas of the Sunday warriors became widely available, so I started collecting as much for the designs as anything else.

Coincidentally, while not offering Nascar-licensed replicas, Matchbox did at that time sell something else I'd always longed for: plain white vehicles as blank canvases to paint yourself. The series was called "Graffic Traffic" and included exotic and muscle cars, semi trucks, rescue vehicles and of course race cars. Each set included two vehicles, 2 or 3 permanent markers of various colors, and a set of stickers.

The Stock Car set was uncanny. While the car itself was a nondescript generic model (a Buick LeSabre body with a faked contemporary Chevy Lumina nose), the included stickers had a number I was just beginning to make my own: 76. I'd realized shortly before that my initials "TL", when signed a certain way, would almost look like a "76". So despite the fact I was otherwise too old to be playing with cars, given that the hard work of making professional scale numbers was done for me... getting that set was a no-brainer. I actually got two: the second to design a car for my younger brother. And use the #38 sticker (which was cool, because 38 is half of 76 and I'm a nerd like that).

After studying the popular Nascar design motifs of the day, and considering the available marker colors and other materials at my disposal, I came up with a theme and a design for "Lucio Brothers Racing". The original cars are long gone, sadly, as the included markers did not adhere well and the castings were cheap. But the original Hauler and a separately sold van I customized to match, survive:

OK, so the van is a Chevy and it's been rednecked. As a support vehicle or side project it could be cool.

The motif as seen on the hauler is kind of bizarre, and was largely an afterthought with colors applied to fit the panels and lines on the casting. The scheme I devised for the cars (the important part!) was more sensible, and summed up as:

- Two main "thematic" colors; one for the front of the car and the other for the rear
- Theme colors to be separated by an angled break, approximately 45 degrees, roughly at the A-pillar
- Two stripes of complementarily contrasting colors to encircle the car, wrapping low around the front air dam, side rocker panels, and rear bumper.
- Additional consideration for sponsors and associates as necessary

I designed my car first, not taking "sponsors" into consideration. The thought was to be an upstart team with its own image... sponsors would hopefully come later. The design I cooked up was this:

1994 Lucio Bros. #76 Ford Thunderbird

Nintendo was chosen for a few reasons, not the least of which was access to printed materials I could cut their logo from (when the car was originally made, I did not have means to reproduce my own). It also paid homage to Super Mario Kart, which ruled the house in those days. The car shown above is Matchbox's more authentic Ford Nascar Thunderbird which was not available in plain white. In late 1993 I bought a standard example that used a white base coat, then sanded all but the parts-provider logos off to get a blank canvas to work from. Using sharpies as before, I redid the same scheme and transferred the same stickers and newer custom paper labels from the original Graffic Traffic car.

After success with this process, I redid my brother's car:

1994 Lucio Bros. #38 Ford Thunderbird

Since my car's sponsor was an afterthought to its design - a cardinal sin amongst Nascar designers - I asked my brother whom he wanted for a sponsor and took that into account. When he said "7-eleven" I balked at first (why would the car not be #7?) but came up with a pleasing design using the Southland Corporation's ubiquitous colors, and home-made labels once again. The design nonetheless sports a "unified team" aesthetic of color separations, but to be a little different the angled break on the sides is reversed.

Soon I had the idea to make an actual hauler, but this proved challenging to make presentable as I only had paper, markers, and gobs of scotch tape to laminate the results with. I had to hand-draw the whole thing, and ended up with:

Yeah, so it looks kind of embarrassing, but at the time it was the best I could do given the tools at my disposal. We did have a computer by then, but its low print resolution and crude graphics capabilities meant printing smooth diagonals, curves, and small letters, was still best left to careful free-handing. Oh well!

Fun fact: I think I used a full roll of scotch tape to laminate the whole thing!

A few years later (1997 or 1998), I decided to "update the sponsor contracts" for #76 and update its paint scheme, to as it might have appeared in the T-bird's last year of Nascar competition...

1997 Lucio Bros. #76 Ford Thunderbird

With Nintendo long established as sponsor, it was time to create a more unified scheme. The N64 was the current game platform (and not as lambasted then as it is now), and its multicolored logo required a bit more contrast. Happily, my computer equipment and skills were better suited to custom graphics although I still had to print them on paper; I wasn't doing enough custom work to justify the expense of decal films and inks.

Doing it right for old times' sake

The LBR 76/38 models occupied various places in display and in storage over the next decade. Obviously my own racing career didn't pan out (more like, never got started) but they were fun reminders of happy times spent with family and friends, and I still had a soft spot for the graphic designs of 1990's Winston Cup cars. Nascar itself became a sad joke during the 2000's, so I didn't really give them much thought and buried them for an extended time with the rest of my die-cast collection (which is for sale). Besides, I was back into model railroading for good.

Sometime in 2007 a train collector posted images of mockups of Tyco model trains proposed for production in the late 70's. This was a glimpse into the model production process I had never seen. Cars were variously hand-painted, then decorated with crude freehand designs, tape, stickers, paper labels.... is this beginning to sound familiar? Posed next to the approved, mass-produced samples, the comparison was striking and amusing.

It got me to thinking... my skills and equipment had both progressed a heckuva lot in a decades' time, and now suddenly that old hand-drawn marker-colored paper-taped hauler didn't seem so ridiculous, so... why not...?

This time, each side is a singular piece of adhesive vinyl printed with a modern photo printer after laying out the graphics in Corel Draw. The ones you could actually buy in the store don't even look THIS good. It's amazing what revisiting something a decade later can do!

Did NASCAR steal my design?

I designed my original #76 car back in 1993. In 1994 I made a 3D rendering of it in the new PC NASCAR Racing game by Papyrus. In 1995, thanks to college internet, I joined an online racing league and a couple of related Nascar graphic-design forums. One of those was IWCCCARS (Internet Winners' Circle Championship CARS), which gained a cult following for some professional photo conversions (remember these were the days long before scanners and bootleged copies of Photoshop were democratized). My freehand design was posted online for all too see, and I receieved many compliments (to put it charitably, many other designs looked like something Peter Max might have devised after a losing battle with Taco Bell), but it was merely all for fun - just a bunch of fans sharing their own free-lanced designs and racing each other on a computer. Having invested no small amount of time in it, I kept the same basic theme for my car over subsequent years (thru 1997) while updating it to fit the enhanced graphical features of newer game versions and photo-editing software, etc.

In late 1997, two years after my #76 design was first posted online, NASCAR opened a short-lived chain of official, themed retail stores called Nascar Thunder. While the concept was pretty lame (you could get the same merch from independent resellers for far less money), I nonetheless paid a visit to the Louisville, KY outlet in January 1998. Imagine my surprise when I found the following car for sale!

Now, take a good look at the two side-by-side:

The number of "coincidences" is nothing short of uncanny! Consider: a Nascar billboard is a totally blank creative palette, offering literally billions of combinations of coordinated color, shape, graphics, fonts, themes, etc to arrive at a sum total design, right?

So what are the odds that someone at Nascar independently designed a car with:

- a predominantly yellow front (and not just yellow... but nearly the SAME shade)
- a predominantly red rear (and again, not just a random "red", but the SAME red)
- a approx. 45-degree front-to-rear slant separation of the two on the sides...
- a convex V-shaped pattern separating the two on the roof...
- ...with the split right under the number (both elements were uniquely unorthodox at the time)
- a contrasting decklid (trunk) panel

Also note the Nascar Thunder car's rocker panels and lower bumpers are conspicuously color-blank for no apparent reason - could it be they forgot to add the blue stripe?

And finally of course, given there were 43 registered full-time Winston Cup teams - which meant more than 50 of the car numbers 0-99 were still available - of ALL the numbers to pick, they just happen to like 76?!

Should I play the lottery?

I suppose it "could" be a fantastic "coincidence". As such, it's pretty amazing. But sometimes I can't help but wonder: if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, some credit would have been nice ;)

As a final footnote: Funnily enough, I was merely about 10 years ahead of the curve:

Fall 2006: Nintendo finally sponsors a car - one of the few remaining Fords on the circuit no less - after all that time! And maybe... just maybe, if you squint just right, it could actually be a "7"6... :)