Penrite Oil: Cutting Room Floor - Boxing Kangaroo
Excerpts from Penrite Oil & Jarrod Harding
Renders: TP Race Design
The Good , the Bad and the Bloody Awful of the Penrite cutting room floor
By Jarrod Harding Director of Motorsport Penrite Oil
So here's one that nearly made it to Bathurst.....
With having great success of the Penrite Racing gold Chrome Bathurst car in 2018 and TP’s Australian flag design of 2017, we really wanted to come out swinging for Bathurst 2019 car. Earlier on in the year we started work on a few ideas , one was a more gold 2 car plan, the other was a green and gold (Australia tribute car)
We actually had Scott Yourston work on the gold concept we ultimately went with , while Tim at TP Race Design and myself concentrated on the Aussie option.
Initially we used a generic Kangaroo image on the rear 1/4 of the car also tossing up between that and a southern cross image . As Tim was designing various options I did some digging into the Australian Pantone colours and use of the boxing Kangaroo. The image of a boxing kangaroo image dates back well over 100 years and has been used in various Australian literature and public imagery.
On my original brief to Tim I had said I want it to look like the Americas cup - Australia II with the green and gold of the 1980's , as I thought that would resonate better with the Supercars audience. So i felt we needed the real version.
I found out that the Australian Olympic Committee has owned that image since the late 1980's and it has been used to represent our competing athlete across various Olympic campaigns.
So with some help from Australian swimming legend Kieran Perkins we contacted the AOC and loosely worked out a cross promotional plan with their marketing team. The plan would see a number of Olympic athletes possibly promoting the upcoming olympic games while appearing at Bathurst and team drive days on social media.
From our side the possibility of getting David Reynolds to wrestle with some judo athletes and Anton De Pasquale to cross train with the Australian swim team was penciled in as ideas.
While we were actually really happy with this design on paper and we went to a number of our internal staff for their input. After showing positive feedback we thought it warranted a larger test , So with Barry and teams help we wrapped half the side of Ash Walsh’s old Erebus Motorsport car #4 that was in storage.
The design was pretty good , we were fairly happy with the back half, though the bonnet needed work mostly around a mono black logo as the full colour just didn't work.
After wrapping, one comment was made the car looked a little like a yellow taxi and with the already tested gold livery we knew it would be a fan favourite. So this design was abandoned in favour of the twin gold cars.
Excerpts from Penrite Oil & Jarrod Harding
Renders: TP Race Design
