Early Barracuda Stripe

[Bob Jasinski]

Happy New Year everyone!

So...my wife and I attended a New Year's Eve party last night at our neighbors place, and we had a great time. There were quite a few people there, some from the neighborhood and some we hadn't met before. My neighbor (the host) has an impressive car collection including a '57 Porsche Speedster. He also invited several of his car friends that also are auto enthusiasts, mostly European cars. The subject of my '65 FS restoration came up and I shared current iPhone pictures of my car with the group. One of the guests was very much into European racing history and asked me if I knew what the significance of the roof stripe was on my FS. I didn't quite understand why he asked the question and replied "it was a styling element the factory offered and could be ordered in different colors depending on body color". He said, I understand that, but do you know the significance of the stripe? I said no, it's just for style as far as I know. He proceeded to tell me the stripe came about from European road racing where each country had specific stripe and body colors to identify what country the car represented, and that the US cars had a blue stripe on a white body, or vice versa. I'm sure some of you knew this, but I had no idea. I went to Wikipedia and found out more:

Racing stripe - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[mvh]

That was part of the FIA's standard for international racing colors. Most of the original FIA European members had single-color racing colors: Britain = Green, France = Blue, Germany = Whiter, Italy = Red, etc. But johnny-come-lately countries (in the Americas and Asia) had to be satisfied with a color plus a stripe color to create a unique identity. USA was White with Blue stripe.

The "racing stripe" on early Barracudas (plus the 67) was a very traditional, road-racing-style stripe. On sports racing cars, the stripe was often aligned with the driver's seating position, rather than being centered on the car — in this way it helped the driver position the car on the track (useful when the front bodywork was all curves and slopes). Lately I have seen some small sporty imports on the street with the racing stripe on the PASSENGER side — this looks idiotic to me. I can only think it is because they are copying the livery of home-market Japanese or British cars, with right-hand drive.

Later in the muscle car era, stripes got applied to every portion of the car (hood, b-pillar, flanks, tail), which really has nothing to do with the traditional concept.