Hagerty’s Dawn Patrol 2020 awards hats, breaks Internet

Well, that escalated quickly.

For years now, connoisseurs from around the globe have prized Hagerty’s “Dawn Patrol” hats distributed during one particular morning of the Pebble Beach Concours. You can’t buy one; you can only earn it by showing up at the right place and the right time. This year, with the concours on hiatus, we decided to get our growing group of commenters and contributors at community.hagerty.com in on the action. The challenge was simple: get your classic or collector vehicle out on the road yesterday morning before the dawn, and prove it to us via a photo in the Hagerty Community. We didn’t promote it heavily and we didn’t make a big deal of the event. How many people would participate? We figured it would be a few dozen. Maybe a hundred.

Boy, were we wrong about that.

Thousands of you fired your cars up Sunday morning and went for a drive. We had so many participants submitting photos—at point, over 100 in a single second—that it caused our website to vapor-lock for a bit.

Not in our wildest dreams could we have imagined this sort of enthusiasm at a time when many people are, frankly, feeling more than a little down for the count. If nothing else, it proves that our members and fans have a love affair with the automobile that transcends the ordinary.

If Dawn Patrol hats were Porsche 911s, then the 2020 model will be that “G” Carrera of the mid-Eighties: hugely popular, found all over the world, and certain to be valuable in the long run. We’ll be working overtime making sure that everybody who qualified gets one. Something tells us that the Dawn Patrol of 2021, whether online or local, will be even bigger. In the meantime, however, we are going to supercharge our contests and giveaways for the Hagerty community. Today, we’re notifying the winner of our “Hot Rod Lincoln” contest that he’s won a brand-new Fender American Telecaster (and he can pick the color) plus a Fender Hot Rod amplifier. In the months to come, we’ll be giving away everything from celebrity memorabilia to… well, have you ever wanted to drive a new Lamborghini at 150 mph? Now’s the time to join the conversation at our community site and find out more.

We salute the members of Hagerty’s Dawn Patrol for 2020. Thank you for staying in the fight. Over and out.