I really hope I'm mistaken

Many years ago I was on my way home from a wedding late one evening when I stopped off at a roadside rest stop to refuel and pick up a cup of coffee. 

Inside, the rest stop was deserted except for the cashier and three tattooed young men with closely shaved heads and black t-shirts, who were waiting to pay for the junk food they'd picked out.

One of them saw me standing behind them in line wearing a tux and with a kippah (yarmulke) on my head, turned around to face me and with a big smile on his face said, "Hey... like my shirt?"

The black shirts they were all wearing looked very much like this:

At the time I didn't understand the significance of the numbers, but the shape of the 'S' made it obvious that it was meant to be a Nazi reference of some sort since the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel) emblem looked like this:

Besides feeling tired and outnumbered, the brazen way in which the guy was smiling at me while showing off his shirt gave me a terrible feeling of vulnerability that I had only read about in history books.

I put down my coffee cup, walked outside prepared for the inevitable fight.  But when I got outside I was relieved to see a State Trooper cruiser pulling into the rest stop. 

I walked over to him and quickly explained that although I hadn't been assaulted, I felt that I had just been the victim of a hate crime.  He looked skeptical and asked me to clarify, but I couldn't find the worlds to explain why being taunted with pseudo-Nazi imagery might qualify as a hate crime.  I could only hope that like pornography, the 'I'll know it when I see it'  litmus test would apply.

As I was talking to the Statie, the guys in the black shirts filed out of the convenience mart with their food and drinks, saw me talking to the cop, and abruptly turned towards their car.  The policeman called them over and after taking one look at their shirts... turned to me with a look devoid of the previous skepticism and told me he would handle it... I should go.

Years later I learned that '88' is a code that white supremacists use as shorthand for 'Heil Hitler' (H being the 8th letter of both the English and German alphabet)... and '14' refers to '14 words', a white nationalist slogan "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children".  [source]

I've often wondered exactly what happened there at the rest stop after I left.

For many years I assumed from the cop's instant change in attitude after seeing the shirts that he'd either arrested them or taken some other concrete legal action.  But more recently I've started to wonder if the prospect of paperwork, a potentially violent confrontation, an overly sensitive complainant, maybe even personal sympathy with the sentiment expressed by the shirts, had caused the cop to simply send them on their way.  I'll never know.

Flash forward to the here and now.

I recently noticed that a user who frequents a popular online forum I like uses the following image as his avatar:

I have never seen this exact image anywhere before, and at first I assumed it must be a motorsports logo of some sort.  The guy using it seems upstanding, and has never made any comments that could be remotely construed as offensive, much less racist.  Yet, the number 88 is just uncommon enough (outside of piano circles, anyway) to stand out and make my 'Spidey-sense' tingle. 

So I sent the user with the 88 avatar a private message in what I hoped would be a breezy, chatty, 'by the way' kinda tone and asked, "Hey, interesting avatar you have there... care to share?".

He never responded.  Somehow the lack of a response seemed almost as damning as an admission. 

So I started searching the web to see if I could find that image... hoping that it would turn out to be related to something innocuous/inoffensive like a sports figure or a race car.

So far I haven't found it anywhere.

So I'm turning to you, dear readers.  Without rushing to judgement, I want to know if any of you have seen this image before:

And if so... what it means.