Our recent story on the dubious legend of how Germany got its silver auto racing color got us looking for original source materials to see if we could establish timelines for not just Germany’s national racing color but for all designated racing colors. As the stories go, not all of the racing colors were set in stone from the beginning, and it took a few decades of revisions to hammer them all out, by which time corporate logos pretty much rendered the colors moot.

Our research is ongoing and perhaps interminable, but we did get some help in the comments to that story from commenter Nick, who pointed out an article in the October 1928 edition of the Allgemeine Automobil-Zeitung in which the Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus laid out not only the formulas for upcoming races but also the agreed-upon racing colors for 23 different countries.

Any guesses on the USA livery? It is more plain than you might imagine.