Penrite Oil: Cutting Room Floor - Bathurst Winning Livery
Article from Penrite Oil & Jarrod Harding
Renders: TP Race Design
How did the Penrite Racing Bathurst Supercars livery come about & what was missing .........
So to get the elephant out of the room firstly.
There was a pretty big disagreement over this car , there was nearly no Penrite branding on this car at Bathurst.
Looking closely you will notice the odd roof branding of the final 2017 Bathurst car, the passenger side is actually missing a piece (The tagline #FORASPECIALBREED and some wording but a blank space)
The week prior to leaving for the race we still hadn't received the final artwork and press release from the team (something we usually send out internally prior to official release , we also sometimes use to arrange posters and signing cards etc) . Though Penrite had supplied the main livery artwork through Tim and we had given it to the team to add their last minute sponsors most notably NAPA and LOCO a couple of weeks prior.
After calling Barry and the commercial team to track down the final artwork we were advised they were finalising a deal with an existing sponsor to include another of their sub brands across the roof of Dave's car.
Rewinding back to 2016 when initially this brand wanted to come in on the team, Penrite had already shaken hands on a non exclusivity deal that we would be the only oil , lubricants partner inc car care.
In the week between the handshake and the contract being drawn up, the other company committed to coming onboard.
At the time Erebus Motorsport were struggling with sponsor support due to the move to Melbourne and changing cars etc. Though the other sponsor was a bit of a conflict to us on a few products, we mutually agreed it was in the best interest of the team to allow them in , but we put a caveat in place that that could not include any of their other subsidiary brands they own as that would further conflict.
Fast forward a year and a half later and in the usual busy Bathurst lead up Erebus's had forgotten this part of our deal.
It was actually a really unfortunate circumstance that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, there was no real malice in it , it just happened. So a week out from Bathurst and the conflict too big to overlook we dug in our heels ,There was no way that was going on the car.
Other than the commercial implications of a conflicting sponsor we didn’t think it was a good idea to have a giant black cat on the roof of Dave's car so close behind the "pussy wagon" saga.
As you can imagine a lot of words were exchanged by all involved, contracts were waved about the place and several heated meetings occurred to find a resolution. Ultimately Barry told me if i wanted it off the car to rip it off my myself , after attempting to do just that , we released it was a full roof wrap. The Erebus guys later covered it over with a piece of black gloss vinyl as the car was being loaded into the truck . i f you look closely you'll see that the patch doesn't match the satin black we chose for that livery.
Arriving at Bathurst, It was bit of an icy start as it had caused a bit of friction between everyone. However that was ultimately resolved with a handshake race morning and an agreement to better communication between all parties.
Some further info on the actual Australian livery
We had been working on a livery concept integrating an Australian flag design into the car for about 2 years. Being an Australian family owned company, we really wanted to push the Aussie message to supercars fans. Plus the Penrite CEO
loves the Aussie flag , we've joked if given his way he'd have the drivers holding a flag while driving the cars.
We just couldn’t seem to get the colours to work on the car, the blue was so difficult to blend with the black red and yellow of our logo. Also, the waving flag was a hard element to integrate. It worked on the passenger side starting from the front of the car to rear, the challenging half was the driver’s side where it runs the other way from the back to the front.
So, in early 2017 Shane, Tim and Myself had been working on Bathurst livery ideas after getting a good season car livery base design done which enabled us to work off. We changed the existing yellow and red lines in favour of blue and white to tie in with the flag, Tim spent a lot of time reworking the flow of the flag, so it would work and not take away from our Penrite branding too much.
You can actually see on the end result where the stars are actually a little prospectively skewed and stretched out from all the reworks
(look closely at the rear doors and ¼’s)
Also, somewhere between design, proofing, vinyl printing and final installation the gradient yellow in the Penrite word logo in a couple of spots on the final car was messed up, if you look close enough on the P and R of the logo, you’ll see it. It’s even kind of noticeable on the model cars.
We also horse-traded with Erebus around that round, as Erebus Motorsport were approached by NAPA AUTO PARTS in promoting their 1st store opening in Australia, they would end up adding a couple of rounds after the Bathurst win. We ended up trading some space on the front splitter and got the windscreen topper (that ripped during the last part of the race) and shared rear ¼ spaces to accommodate their request and to help Barry out. Earlier on there was talk of NAPA fully taking our bonnet space, thankfully we declined that for Bathurst and that later became the Sydney car.
We did also go through several incarnations of the car mostly around the bonnet and the key messages that we wanted to promote. We all ultimately decided it best to keep it as clean as possible . It was really great to see the car cross the finish line and on the podium, it was a really standout livery and a long time in the making .
Article from Penrite Oil & Jarrod Harding
Renders: TP Race Design
