Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars! 
This week’s question: In the early 1950s Ford F-100 pickups with eight-cylinder engines carried a V-8 emblem in the middle of their grille. What emblem did the trucks with six-cylinder engines carry?
If you think you know the answer, make the jump and see if you’re right.
Badging to denote an engine size, horsepower, or format is a tradition that goes back to almost the dawn of the automotive age. In fact, once Ransom Olds discovered that naming his cars after the shape of their dashboards, it became one of the dominant conventions. Ford, ever the savvy marketer, came up with a wonderful model badge for the introduction of their Model 18 in 1932, one that boldly noted the car’s defining feature, it’s V8 engine. In fact, so important was the engine that shortly after its introduction it became generally known simply as the Ford V8.
The engine/car’s logo was a beautiful art deco number eight intertwined with the letter V. It became so closely associated with the Ford model that Fiat thought the company owned the trademark on it and when they introduced a V8 engine of their own they called the 8-V to avoid legal entanglements.
Ford continued to promote its V8 engines, fitting the badges to both cars and trucks so powered over the year. With the introduction of the second generation of F- series light, medium, and heavy duty trucks in 1953, the V8-equipped models wore their engine-denoting badges front and center on their cross-bar grille. Not all F-series were V8s however, and Ford decided to offer a badge for their six-cylinder trucks as well. It simple wasn’t quite as elegant nor as descriptive.
From Mid Fifty.com

That’s right, this week we have a picture solution to the trivia challenge. As you can see Ford gave the six cylinder trucks a star badge on the grille, where the V8s would have their, well, V8. The third generation F-series arrived in 1957, and with them so did the Y-block OHV V8. Since the stylized V8 emblem had been so closely associated with Ford’s flatheads the badging was changed as well. But now when you see a second generation truck on the road—should you be so lucky—you’ll be able to tell its engine at a glance.
Image: MidFifty.com