Baseball car for a baseball town!

St. Louis is a baseball crazy city with a huge loyal fan base. So I shouldn’t be surprised at seeing a spanking new white VW Beetle with red paint trim looking exactly like the stitching on a baseball. The Beetle was a baseball. LOL Didn’t manage to catch the license plate but bet it was personalized with some sort of nod to Cardinals baseball. Very distinctive and actually quite attractive.

Probably not the first one but it’s a fun look. I have a scale model of the New beetle painted up with the baseball stitching on it. The one you saw was most likely a vinyl wrap (just peel it off when you want to change the look)

Vinyl wrap? Really? Wow. You’d never know it from what it looks like driving past in traffic. It was a fun look to the car.

Not a fast ball, more of a curve ball I would think…

FDLOL Good one oblivion!

Yeah like the progressive insurance cars looking like they are smashed up. Some folks around here are big U of M football fans and bought an old ambulance all painted up in maroon and gold pennants. When I look at a car though I always look at how hard it would be to match the paint.

Years ago the local football coach was a near folk hero winning state championships every two to three years. He had an old International scout He plowed neighbors out with that needed a little minimal body work to pass inspection. The Booster Club got wind of the project. They went to the body shop and had the entire body gone over, brazed metal into all rust holes and had it painted the school colors ( lots of orange) with stripes the entire length of it. It looked like a big football helmet. The body shop donated all the labor and parents payed for material. Being embarrassed by the generosity but not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, he stopped plowing with it and donated it to the school to carry gear to the games and use for school functions. Everybody wins .

http://brucessuperbody.com/wp-content/uploads/photo3.jpg

like that?

@bscar2 – Yep! Of course the red “stitching” extends in an arc across the sides and front of the body in the perfect proportions and position to look like the stitching on a baseball.

@Marnet
True, Cardinal Nation is serious about baseball.
Yes, most likely its a wrap. There is an suv driving around STL that’s wrapped with advertising but the vehicle appears to be chrome, entirely. When you get close you can see the paint texture and know its a wrap. But it is eye catching.

@meaneyedcatz
All the buses and business vehicles that have advertising artwork paint jobs that extend seamlessly across the windows, are those wraps??? How do they manage to have clear visibility through them on the side and rear windows for the driver to see out???

@Marnet
Yes, those are all wraps. How do they see? Good question. I suppose its no worse than dark tint on glass.

Ah, interesting to know. Thank you.

Those wraps that cover the whole vehicle including the windows use a special material on the windows that allows you to see out, although it’s like looking through a window screen. Some city bus’s use the same thing for the advertisements on the side. Was first used on the helmets of Indy type racecars to use as much ad space as possible including the drivers visor. Easier to see out if it’s right in front of your eyes than if you are just sitting inside the vehicle.

Ah, thank you for the explanation OlyDoug.

You’re welcome, I’ve known about this type of wrap for a few years, read about it in one of the car magazines (I read pretty much all of them so I can’t always remember in which one i find things)

We have an insurance agent with a wrapped Smart who often parks across the street. We had never met him, but in a hot tub at a resort a hundred miles away there was this very familiar guy… Took me a couple of minutes to identify him as the agent who parked near us. He’s a State Farm agent, but he paid to have his car wrapped. Said it was not that expensive and it generates a lot of calls. The companies that do wraps have templates for all the pieces needed to cover a particular car. After printing the pieces they use a heat gun and tools to smoothe the film in place. The agent has a gregarious personality, which is good if you drive around with a big picture of your face on your car door, with name and phone number. Must he be an older picture as he looks somewhat handsome in it. Gotten rather pudgy since then.

At a recent auto show there was a Hyundai Veloster with a fashionable matte paint job. The company rep was explaining it wasn’t a real matte paint job, a complex, expensive process requiring many layers. This was the poor man’s equivalent, done with a wrap. Race cars often use wraps so I suspect their matte finishes are done more like a Hyundai than a Bentley. It looked just fine, and can easily be removed if you want gloss paint.)-

The Matte wraps are much easier to care for compared to matte finish paint.