This past weekend the Formula 1 circus came to Austin, Texas for the United States Grand Prix. I was in attendance. With the international nature of the event you see people waving and draped in all manner of flags. A Metric Ton of Mexican flags, lots of Union Jacks, a smaller number of English or Scottish flags, a surprising number of Aussie and Finnish flags, and a handful of other nations.
One flag in particular stood out, it was a Black/Yellow/White tricolor. My initial thought was it was one of the Baltic Republics but the Wikipedia entry for Flag of Russia tells me this was the flag of the Russian Empire from 1858 to 1883 and is currently favored by Russian Nationalists and Monarchists.
So, what was further interesting was that the flag was modified to include these words on the yellow and white stripes: TIGRE (yellow stripe) PAVEI (white stripe)
Google doesn’t return any useful matches for this word pair. Possible that the “I” was a lower case “L”, but the rest of the letters were all block uppercase. Any Dopers have any clue what the meaning of the flag was? If it wasn’t political in nature (which I somewhat doubt given the flag waver’s choice of the Tsarist banner and its current use), it could have been simply been a message supporting the Russian F1 driver Daniil Kvyat.