How A $13 Hat Caused Chaos At America’s Swankiest Car Show

Are you familiar with the Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance tradition of Dawn Patrol? Probably, but I’m going to tell you, anyway. You see, because Pebble Beach is a golf course (I didn’t see any windmills or novelty sub-scale reproductions of Mount Rushmore but I’ll take their word for it), the cars that are displayed there can’t just be set up there and sit overnight. So all of the cars have to trundle in and take their positions very early in the morning, right about dawn, and waking up early to actually witness this majestic event has become a tradition among the people who are privileged enough to attend. But possibly even more important than seeing the beautiful cars move under their own power are the hats.

Yes, hats! I mean, what is the point of doing something if you don’t get some manner of tangible proof that you did it? No point, that’s what. That’s why the good people at Hagerty, the classic car insurance juggernaut, have been sponsoring Dawn Patrol since 2004, and that sponsorship includes giving out coffee, donuts, and a limited number of very coveted hats.

These hats, which have had a pretty consistent design, if not color scheme, since the beginning, are handed out by Hagerty operatives at the beginning of Dawn Patrol and tend to go very quickly. Getting a hat is considered a grand achievement among the Pebble Beach hardcore, and competition for the hats is fierce. As soon as the hats come out, the Hagerty people giving them out are mobbed, and there’s grabbing and flailing and shoving and all manner of behavior that would normally seem unseemly in such genteel surroundings.

All of this gave us an idea…But before I get into that and show you our YouTube video of pure chaos, just look how much Dawn Patrol hats go for on eBay!

Seriously, these hats generate an absurd level of competition and chaos. Look at these comments from places like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook:

…and look what Autoweek had to say about this back in 2023:

“It’s all about the hat,” Colin explains, just before a frenzy of middle-aged to senior citizen men bum rush a trio of Hagerty shirt-wearing workers. Hands are outstretched, grasping for a shot at the one or two hundred hats available, amid a crowd of 300-400 people.

I politely ask for one and receive the final hat from a bag, though an emotion-boiling shouting match ensues up the fairway between two gray-haired fellows. Who truly deserves the final hat? It’s hard to say, but a former hat passer tells me that fights and inappropriate behavior surrounding the cherished caps are almost a guarantee.

So, as you can surmise, the Dawn Patrol hat tradition is kind of a strange, brutal thing. Sure, Hagerty likes to stress the desirability and tradition parts over the fancy-people-in-nice-clothes-clawing-at-one-another part, but can you blame them?

 

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Anyway, all of this gave us an idea. I think it happened during Dawn Patrol last year, when David finally managed to get a hat, and experienced the madness first hand. Matt, David, and I were all talking about this strange tradition, the fierce competition to get a hat, the deliberately limited supply, the sheer absurdity of it all, when we had the idea that maybe, just maybe, it could be fun to sort of, you know, reward all of the people who showed up at Dawn Patrol with less greed in their hearts, those who maybe would like a hat but were less willing to abdicate a portion of their humanity to get one.

Or maybe they just came a few minutes too late.

We thought it’d be funny if we could maybe do what we do best in any given situation: devalue our surroundings. In this case, that would mean we’d relieve some of the hat scarcity by providing  more hats. I’m not sure which one of us came up with the “Yawn Patrol” play on the Dawn Patrol name, but it was just too good to not use. We decided to leap into action, and make a batch of Yawn Patrol hats for the next Dawn Patrol.

Of course, for us, leaping into action means waiting months and months and procrastinating until it was almost time for Pebble Beach, then remembering how much we have to do, and frantically designing a hat and getting it manufactured just in time to make it. That’s how we do it!

The design turned out to be interesting: We wanted to include our legendary Nissan Murano CrossCab that we’d be taking to Monterey, and I put it on blocks for that extra dose of classiness. We also wanted to include our favorite “Christmas tree” plastic fasteners, arrayed in an arc around the CrossCab, which just looked better silhouetted over a hemi-oval shape, and then put our AUTOPIAN/Yawn Patrol/2025 text below.

Incredibly, via some wild and definitely unplanned serendipity of design fate and convergence, our design ended up, to a few folks, resembling the official Hagerty Dawn Patrol hat design, at least well within the legal boundaries of acceptable parody. What are the odds of that? Astounding.

We got our hats, and formulated a plan, devious in its complexity, because that complexity was not complex, at all. Each of us operatives – Matt, David, and myself – would carry in as many hats as we could, secreted in bags and backpacks with personal items on top like sunblock, snacks, and personal lubricants to avert suspicion. We’d get past the security by playing it as cool as possible, which may include whistling cavalierly, as demanded.

If any of us were caught carrying, say 20 hats, who knows what could have happened? I mean, there’s no specific rule about carrying a lot of hats into the Concours, or even giving out hats, and there are certainly no posted signs saying DO NOT DISTRIBUTE HATS or anything like that, but still! The power that a Concours D’Elegance security guard has can easily corrupt, and we didn’t need that sort of hassle, being thrown in Pebble Beach jail, having to subsist on oysters and Prosecco for who knows how long?

We made it in undetected, somehow, and, perhaps, a little disappointingly. Some part of me was hoping for drama, for someone to grab or tackle me, or even throw a punch! I would have happily taken a tackle or punch, provided we were able to catch it all on video. I guess it’s all for the better that nothing like that happened, though.

Finally, we were on the green, watching the hats get distributed, as the various Hagerty representatives roamed around, getting mobbed by hat-hungry crowds. I approached one of the Hargertrons and asked if they had any hats left; when I was told “no,” I took that as my cue to start. We agreed that our hats were primarily for those that missed out on the official Dawn Patrol ones, a sort of consolation prize for those who didn’t quite make it. This meant we started as soon as the Hagerty hats ran out.

“I have hats!” I yelled. “More hats here!”

And then it started. First a bit slowly, as people were just realizing that a new source of hats had emerged. A few people came up and took a hat. Then a few more. Then, at some point, some unspoken signal was telegraphed throughout the masses, and those few people soon became a huddle, then a group, then a crowd, and then, yes, a mob.

A mob of hat-crazed madpeople, a flock of hat-hungry beasts whose only goal was the acquisition of headgear, no matter the (non-monetary) cost.

Hands were being thrust towards me, outstretched, beckoning at first, but then growing more and more agitated. Soon the waiting hands turned to grabbing hands.

And grabbing hands turned into clawing hands.

It got crazy very quickly.

There were so many hands coming at my face, and while there were people yelling, that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst were the ones that locked eyes with you, silently, with dead eyes, dead save for one overriding goal, a goal that eclipsed everything else in their lives at that moment: Hat. Gimme free hat.

I was harrowed, spooked, but I had to keep going, keep flinging hats at this mob, because that was the only way to get free, to free myself from these hats that drew them in with such ferocity.

Did it get to me? Sure it did. Being out there in the shit, it changes you. You see people for who they really are. All these ideas of status and class and refinement, it’s bullshit, it’s all bullshit. The next time you hear an affluent person lamenting about some holiday-time near-riot at a Walmart over PlayStation 5s or Cabbage Patch Kids or Labubus or whatever, and somehow suggesting that the sort of behavior exhibited there is beneath them, I want you to know what a pile of crap that is.

The rich are no better than the brokest-asses out there in the world. Dangle some free shit in front of them, and these well-heeled, well-dressed, dignified captains of industry and respected board members and grandparents are as willing as anyone to shove people onto the ground to get their bony claws onto a free, $13-ish hat. I know. I’ve seen it. Civilization is a veneer, people, no matter how high you reside on that ladder of status, and all it takes to peel that veneer away is a crappy baseball cap.

That said, there were appreciative people, like car-collecting and Volkswagen-community legend Randy Carlson:

 

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And there were plenty more! I saw lots of these hats sprinkled throughout the green, among all the stunning cars that day, and I think people appreciated not just the extra chance to get a hat, but the idea of poking a bit of fun at this strange tradition and its associated chaos.

After we had been relieved of our hats – which felt like hours to me, in the middle of the scrum, but really only lasted minutes – we were wondering if there would be any blowback. So far, we only encountered a bit. A representative of Pebble Beach did approach us, drawn to the Yawn Patrol hat Matt was wearing, but didn’t realize exactly that we were the ones who gave out the hats.

He asked if we knew who we got the hat from, and mentioned that they had considered asking to confiscate the hats, or at least get people not to wear them, but ultimately it was decided that they couldn’t really do that. I love that they talked about confiscating the hats at all, though!

He also mentioned that, while he thought it was pretty funny, this whole Yawn Patrol business, Hagerty was an actual sponsor who paid good money to be able to pass out hats, and whoever committed this act of hatual degeneracy most certainly did not sponsor anything.

He wasn’t wrong about that.

Still, I saw no rules about not giving out hats anywhere, and I don’t know how seriously they were really taking this. Still, I told him I hoped he’d bring those reprobates to justice, and he went on his way. I may have a recording of this event that we didn’t feel comfortable publishing, but if you see me out somewhere, feel free to ask if I actually do, and if so, I’ll show it to you.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the deep soul-terror that comes from offering free hats to a large crowd of hat-crazed socialites. I don’t think I’ll soon forget the look of cold, predator focus in their eyes, those lotion’d hands with their well-manicured fingers clawing and scrabbling inches from my face, the wholesale abdication of the very concept of common good and cooperation as soon as that bag opened and I was foolish enough to exclaim “free hats!”

I see those grabbing hands when I close my eyes now; that sort of thing doesn’t leave you easily. I wonder how we can top this next year?

[Ed Note: For the record, we’re friends with Hagerty, and we are huge fans of the Concours d’Elegance. We just figured we’d have a bit of fun and give some love to those who hit the snooze button a few too many times like we always do. -DT]