Page 36 - Australasian Paint & Panel Magazine Sep-Oct 2019

Winning formula
36
PAINT&PANEL
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
WWW.PAINTANDPANEL.COM.AU
ABOVE:
Getting the contours right is a challenge every year.
LEFT: McLaren uses AkzoNobel paints for the team’s livery.
nine-month Formula One season begins at the start of the new year. And the first car the paint shop team coats never even gets to see the light of day.
DUMMYING UP
This is a mock-up of the full-size chassis, called a buck, and designed to test colour schemes. Washington says: “It’s a full- scale dummy chassis. We use it to gain a proper visual understanding of the con- tours of the car. It’s easy to look at a CAD (Computer Aided Design) model on a com- puter screen. But it helps to have a physi- cal model when you’re lining out (mark- ing out paint lines and contour) the car, separating out where each colour will sit.
“Every year, the surface of the car throws up certain lumps and bumps – gills, foils, hatches and so on – and we need to get our contours to work around those. On a CAD model, the line might cut through them, but you’ve got to work out what’s best in reality. It throws up a lot of challenges every year. The buck is also useful for trialling new painting processes. We can see if a new paint or a lacquer is working, or if a masking line isn’t working properly.”
If you think that’s job done for Wash- ington and his 11-man team, you’d be very much mistaken. After every race, the cars are flown back to McLaren’s base in Woking, better known for being
a commuter town 30 miles from the cen- tre of London, to be refurbished for the next race.
The construction of Formula One cars has always shadowed the aircraft indus- try. In the 1960s, teams used aluminium body panels around an aluminium space frame with the then-primitive aerody- namic parts made from glass reinforced plastic. For 1981, McLaren introduced the notion of making the monocoque, or tub, out of carbon fibre. This is standard practice now.
CARBON FOOTPRINT
Carbon composites make up about 85% of the volume of a grand prix car. These thermoset resins and epoxies are used on bodywork, crash structures, the sus- pension and even the gearbox and cool- ing ducts for radiators. It’s a misnomer that composites are stronger than steel. They can be similar in strength terms but composites are less dense – between 30 and 50% lighter – making them stronger and stiffer than metal per unit of weight.
Despite their extensive use, composites contribute just 25% towards the 660kg (the 80kg for the driver is in addition to this) that a 2019 Formula One car weighs. The combination of fibre types that makes up these composites varies depending on whether the part is used for something to absorb energy in a crash or for the torsion- al stiffness of the chassis.