| Issue: 14 | Published: 15 May, 2003 |
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Battledress By Gavin McGrath. Pics by Scott Wensley and Peter Elliott. |
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On a grid of 30 brightly-coloured racing cars it's hard to stand out - especially with hundreds of other companies also trying to sell their message on their 300km/h billboards. And, while only one car can be the winner, the rest have to get their point across as well.
If winning is the best way to get noticed, having an attractive or eye-catching car is probably the next best thing, as Big Kev knows better than anyone. What works and what doesn't isn't what you'd call an exact science but the results are usually pretty clear cut.
A lot of people in the sport, including management at some other teams, concede the 00 Motorsport Falcon of Craig Lowndes works extremely well as a design. And, judging by comments on V8 Supercar web chat [conrod.com] many racing fans reckon the old Lansvale design doesn't.
Car design is now an important business. Dick Johnson Racing has put thousands of dollars and dozens of man-hours into coming up with a new look for its next generation Falcon racers. Team general manager Steve Chalker believes the new look is a vital part of the team's comeback strategy.
"I don't think I'm saying anything startling by saying we've had a couple of bad seasons," Chalker says.
"So this is all about making a fresh start. Having a new car helps but we also wanted to freshen up our whole image so people would see us and think, 'gee, DJR is back in town!'."
Chalker admits that the 00 Motorsport "green-eyed monster" has set the standard and shown how important a car's livery was to a team's marketing efforts.
So when Chalker arrived at DJR, changing the "staid" look of the cars was one of his first orders of business.
"I thought we'd had the same sort of look for a long time, so I suggested making a radical change away from that red and yellow thing we've had, in one form or another, for years.
"The BA Falcon gave us a unique opportunity to make that major change."
Having made the decision to change, the next hurdle was to convince major sponsor Shell, although Chalker says they were pretty open to new suggestions.
"We explained that the livery was part of DJR's brand equity and that we wanted to be masters of our own destiny. They were happy to go along with that," he explains.
"We've still got Shell's colours but we've added a few of our own to make the cars look much more aggressive.
"I think our cars have looked a bit conservative in the past and that the red has been very heavy - our new look is much lighter."
Shell, however, was only one of the team's sponsors that needed to be considered, and Chalker says it was important to make the rest of the team's supporters fit into the layout without making the car look like a dog's breakfast.
"The most difficult was VB," Chalker admits. "Green is not an easy colour to blend in."
But green was something that CUB had to insist on for its popular brand, according to company brand manager Peter Gallagher. "Victoria Bitter is recognised as an iconic Australian brand and VB-green is an integral part of the brand's identity," he says. "Building great brands is a combination of many factors - consistency of logo representation and colour being two of those.
Just as you wouldn't see Fords Blue Oval depicted in red, you will not see the Victoria Bitter brand represented on anything other than VB-green.
"Maintaining the brand's integrity, including trademark colours, is always important to any company, particularly when that brand is so readily recognised by its colour scheme. It's more important to CUB than colour co-ordinating with other sponsor brands."
But Gallagher admits that CUB had to make allowances or else go its own way with a team, something the company did not want to do. "An entire car painted in any sponsor's colours or branding would, for all intents and purposes, give the impression of team 'ownership'," Gallagher explains.
"Obviously a full-car livery will always have more impact than co-branding with other sponsors, but that level of exposure isn't always desirable.
"As silly as it sounds, a full car livery may well be too much exposure for a particular brand.
"We decided it is more important for CUB to be associated with a highly professional, successful team, with more subtle branding, rather than mass branding on a less professionally presented car.
"If the livery is particularly attractive, it will initiate consumer recall, regardless of whether they support that team or driver, or not. An attractive car like Lansvale Smash Repairs, or unusual livery like the Daily Planet car, is also likely to gain TV exposure, regardless of how successful it is.
"But we did need to be mindful of the placement of branding on the car so that CUB's commitment to the team was represented in a size and location that reflects our support."
In the end, the team and sponsor came to a happy compromise.
"We didn't want the car to look like a bunch of stickers had just been plonked onto it," Steve Chalker says. "It meant changing the design and moving things around a bit to give Victoria Bitter a clean bit of space.
"It required a bit of negotiation and manipulation but everyone is now very happy with it."
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Peter Elliott, the man with the paint
Ford designer Peter Elliott is more used to designing great looking road cars than creating a new look for a race team. But Elliott was only too happy to take up the challenge to bring V8 Supercar's oldest team into the 21st century. "Designing the new livery for the 2003 Shell cars was a great chance to re-define the look of the team completely. "Bold colours, and the basic mass and proportions of the BA race car, was a fantastic set of building blocks to start with, and I started off with a fairly free rein from Steve (Chalker) to explore what designs could represent a dynamic and powerful scheme for the team. "Using a side view underlay which I set up on our computer sketch program, I applied a series of colour layouts which used the basic Shell colours of yellow, red, and white, along with some blue from the Helix graphic. "Some of these designs had very little to do with the Shell Helix logo directly. It was a case of throwing colour at the car (so to speak) and seeing how it checked out. You never know what may result from this approach at times. "From a totally different tack, I tried to 'morph' the Shell logo and apply it to the car in various ways. This approach really started to come together, as it gave the car a big, bold, powerful, and unmistakably 'Shell' look. "It took me quite a few attempts to get the design pretty close to the final layout, and even then the design had to be tweaked further to better fit other sponsors' logos such as VB and Ford. This final version also had to be drawn in front, back, and top, along with the original side view in order to get a better understanding of the design in three dimensions. "Throughout the entire development time I continually bounced my ideas off the DJR boys to get direction and feedback. One of the wonders of email was being able to send sketches back and forth as fast as you could draw them, and then continually evolving the design to suit. "I also had the chance to apply the final livery layout to the team's transporters, along with the opportunity to offer suggestion for teams clothing and merchandise. All good fun! "It's great overall though, as the team will have a bold and definitive look for the 2003 season. Working at the Ford design studio here in Broadmeadows, (Vic) designing the GT and the BA race car is a pretty rewarding job to say the least." "To then also mix it up a bit, and get a chance to get involved in developing the livery layouts for a top team such as DJR, was an awesome experience." |
The makeover
The decision that a whole new look was needed for its cars was just the first step for Dick Johnson Racing. The next step was deciding what that whole new look would be.
The team invited people to come up with designs but in the end went with one by Ford's chief designer Peter Elliott.
Elliott generated his designs using a computer, which made it easier to fine-tune what would eventually become the final version of the livery.
Because a design can look a lot different in the metal than it does on the computer screen, DJR then did a full-size mock-up of the design on a new BA Falcon XR6 Turbo.
The mock-up design was done using masking tape and gave the team a clear image of what the final race car would look like as well as an idea on how easy it would be to repaint it after the inevitable panel damage from close V8 racing.
According to Chalker there were plenty of other things that had to be taken into account, including the size and position of the car numbers, and other V8 Supercar logos. All of that was put to the test on the XR6.
The paintwork on many cars looks complex, but the painting itself is usually fairly simple. DJR started with a white car and most of the intricate design work will be added later as stick-on decals.
When large areas need to be painted another colour they are taped up and painted separately.
"We started the process in September," says Chalker. "That's when we first saw what the BA XR front looked like. Since then we've been aiming to put together something that really stands out while trying to stay as loyal as possible to our sponsors.
"At this stage we've done about two thirds of the first car and we're very excited about it. "When it's finally unveiled it will be fresh, new and aggressive. It'll re-launch the whole team," he says.
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STARTING FROM SCRATCH
Unlike Dick Johnson Racing, which has carried Shell sponsorship since 1987, Mark Larkham's team has had to start with a clean sheet of paper twice in the past few years. When Larkham's partnership with Mitre 10 ended, and again with ICS, the team had to reinvent its entire look. Mark Larkham Motorsport has its own expertise in design and presentation but the team has also had to meet some pretty strict sponsor demands. It's a very fine balancing act and on one occasion Larkham's marketing team had to stick by their guns when a sponsor's consultant insisted on a look the team knew wouldn't work. When those people have a say on whether or not you get paid, it takes courage to stand your ground. "We always insist on having an involvement in designing our livery," Larkham Motorsport team manager Steve Tibaldi says. When negotiating with current sponsor Orcon Steel, for example, coming up with the final look required a lot of give and take between team and sponsor. "We had a livery idea when we pitched with Orcon. They had an idea too, so we met somewhere in the middle," Tibaldi explains. "Our current layout combines their corporate colours with some of our ideas. The blue, along with the orange/yellow and the white are Orcon's colours. But the silver was our suggestion as was GT stripes to strengthen our Ford branding - we wanted to relive the look of the old Cobras and the GT40." It took three goes to get the team's current look, including many sketches and drawings, and even a scale model painted up in the colours. The final result is a car regarded by many as one of the classiest looking in the field. The team's previous ICS scheme, however, was less successful - a poll on one V8 Supercar website named it as among the ugliest. "The less said about that whole situation the better," Tibaldi says. According to Tibaldi, however, a team needs to make some compromises with its look - if its main sponsor had hot pink corporate colours, then Mark Larkham would race a hot pink Falcon. But good design means there's usually a way to make it all fit. "Depends on how big the sponsorship is," Tibaldi explains. "When Makita came on board their main colour was red and our main sponsor then, Mitre 10, was worried it would dominate the whole car. "So our livery was designed to blend appropriately for each investment and balance each sponsor's investment with the other. "We had six different sponsors on the Mitre 10 car but proper design made it look good. "I believe you can make any sponsor combination work as long as you have good designers and the sponsors are prepared to listen." |
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The good, the bad, and the downright ugly
Ten years of V8 Supercars have produced many good-looking race cars. But they've not always got it right and some teams have turned out some hideous monstrosities too. These days the gap between the Sarah Janes and the Plain Janes of the racetrack is much less, but there are one or two cars which are still in serious 'paper bag over the head' territory. THE GOOD THE BAD: THE UGLY: THE RIGHT OF REPLY: "The trouble is, I suppose, Benetton changed their look after the 80s, and we kind of didn't..." "But Sydney V8 Supercar fans may be in for something very different in 2003 and we plan to move ourselves further up the list in terms of sexy V8 Supercar-appeal soon. Lansvale Racing Team cars throughout the past two decades have always been very colourful and this has been a hallmark of the team. For some it would be sad to see the colours go, but for those who voted, it will be a time of celebration! "I tell you there are some cruel fans out there, we can think of at least three team colour schemes that are uglier than ours, including one colour scheme that hasn't changed since 1995 - but we won't go there..." |
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