Spies Hecker, one of the three global refinish brands of Axalta Coating Systems has released details of the intricate painting process that goes into creating the new livery for the 2017 Mercedes-AMG F1 W08 EQ Power+ race car. The refinish supplier has been responsible for the paint on the high-impact, instantly-recognisable liveries on the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport Silver Arrows race cars for three years.

The 2017 livery is designed to capture the Mercedes-Benz brand values of “Emotion and Intelligence”, with an electric blue visual representation of the airflow across the car running from the front wing to trailing edge of the side-pods. These sleek, thin green and blue lines give an instant impression of speed and movement, even when the car is standing still. The design conjures up the image of sparks flying over the speeding race car’s chassis, making it look almost electrified. 

The design process started in 2016 season and involved the F1 Mercedes UK and Daimler AG in Germany. Andrew Moody, Head of Paint and Graphics at Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, heads a tema of 15 and is ultimately responsible for re-creating the conceptual designs on the car. He says, “We give feedback from our perspective. So, not on how intricate or difficult the design may be to re-create once, but rather on how easily it can be reproduced accurately many hundreds or thousands of times, and under extraordinarily tight timeframes, during the season.”

Andrew adds, “Once everyone is happy, we usually get a visit from the senior decision makers so they can see what the painted livery looks like in person. And when we have the green light, we then paint the previous season’s car in the new livery, just to get a feel for it.”

The 2017 Mercedes-AMG F1 W08 EQ Power+ race car has 13 colours, none of which are commercially available: five shades of green, three shades of blue, four shades of graphite silver, and the main colour, called Stirling Silver after Sir Stirling Moss who drove for Mercedes in 1955.

The Paint and Graphics team use a variety of Spies Hecker products on the race cars. They start with Priomat® Wash Primer 4075. Then they use either Permasolid® HS Vario Primer Surfacer 5340, a high solids primer surfacer, or Permasolid® HS Performance Surfacer 5320, a fast drying 2K HS sanding surfacer. Once the surfaces are prepped, they follow with Permahyd® Hi-TEC Base Coat 480. Andrew says, “We finish the components off with either Permasolid® HS Optimum Plus Clear Coat 8650, a hugely reliable clearcoat, or Permasolid® HS Speed Clear Coat 8800 for parts we need to get done and dried quickly.”

The intricate livery means it takes around 150 hours to paint a race car, with the nose and rear wing each taking about 12 hours and with hundreds of panel to be painted each week speed of application and reliability is key.

The new livery’s complex lines, stripes and spark effects run across multiple components. So requires special skill. Andrew explains “We work with specially built “jigs”, which are essentially dummy parts that allow us to reproduce each individual component accurately in terms of its size and shape, and most vitally, also the colours, lines, shading and design. So where you have three panels coming together and multiple lines crossing those, in different colours and shading, it is quite complicated and delicate to spray those panels and to get it right, and this is where Permahyd Hi-TEC really helps us because it is exceptional at multi-toning and designed paintwork. It allows us to mask directly after flash-off. This year we have introduced digital masks to help us with the reproducibility of the lines.”

Joachim Hinz, Spies Hecker Brand Manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, says, “This year’s livery is really very special and looks fantastic. We’re delighted the Spies Hecker Hi-TEC Performance System has once again proven itself to the team to be a robust, fast and efficient refinish paint material that delivers outstanding colour accuracy over and over again for the team. And it can stand up to the incredibly challenging and difficult environments of today’s international F1 circuits.”