Always a foam sleeve that contains a side stand plate. The sleeve keeps the metal plate from rattling and scratching. The sleeve also turns out to be a pretty good housekeeping item because it holds all the dirt and water that comes along with the plate. Sometimes paperwork, garage door opener, EZpass, sunglasses, flat kit or sundry small tools. When diagnosing running problems it has held my DMM Velcroed to the lid and hooked up to the TPS signal wire as well as a vacuum gauge Teed to the fuel pressure regulator. (That was enlightening, learned quite a lot from that, but that's for a new thread.)