Quote:
Originally Posted by GORDON STREETER
I know that for the works teams in the Mille Miglia each car would have its starting time painted on the car, which would allow spectators some indication of their relative placement.
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They had a signpainter at the Miglia, there's footage of him at work in a Motorfilms Quarterly DVD. All by hand, seemingly always the same which gave the numbers a distinctive house style. Mercedes was an exception - it had its own typography, presumably stickers. Indy had a painter as well, there's an article about him in one of the Clymer yearbooks.
Numbers were assigned in different ways. The British Grand Prix 1952, for example, was in alphabetical order of car name, so number 1 was the Alta of Graham Whitehead, and so on, via Aston-Butterworth, Connaught, Cooper, Ferrari, Gordini and HWM to Maserati at 32-5. Le Mans sometimes did so in descending order of engine capacity; in 1952 again the big 7 litre Cunninghams were 1-3 and the Monopoles and Panhards in the 750cc category were in the fifties and sixties. And Monaco sometimes put them in alphabetical order of country of entry. So 1959 saw Porsche (Allemagne) at 2, 4 and 6, the Equipe Nationale Belge Coopers (Belgique) at 10-12, Lucienbonnet (France) at 14, BRMs/Lotus/Cooper (Grande Bretagne) at 16-44 , Ferrari/Maserati (Italie) at 46-54 , Chiron's private Maserati (Monaco) at 56. Continentals seemed to avoid odd numbers for two reasons; firstly, superstition (13/17 would be missed out); secondly, practice would be done with odd numbers, so pirate programme sellers would not be able to stick the official entry list in their wares.