Jordan Paint Shop Pros

On average each race car is re-sprayed 15 times per season. The people who do the business with the spray guns on Jordan's distinctive yellow cars are TT Race and Rally Ltd. at Tamworth in the Midlands of England.

"Before the team produces the first chassis of the year, we'll meet up at the Jordan factory at Silverstone with a graphic designer, who will give us a rough idea of the outline he wants us to follow for the rest of the year," explains company boss Trevor Turner. "Next, we draw out the main colour lines, Jordan approves our work and we produce a master tracing. The original graphic layout is all done on computer, but the actual drawing of what is required is done by hand. We are basically given images and told to make the car look the same."

The chassis or tub is transported to Tamworth to undergo a preparation procedure before painting can start. "The tub is in bare carbon and the first stage is to mask off all the areas which do not need painting," continues Turner. "Once that is done, we cover it in primer and rub it back to a point where you can just about see through it, which means we know there is hardly any weight on it at that stage in terms of paint."

In a sport where computers and rule the roost, this is one process that owes to the skill of the artist and good hand-eye co-ordination. "There are very few areas on these cars where you can use machines, because of the shapes involved," admits Turner. "We usually put the black on first and we can get our paint to dry in just fifteen minutes. We use normal two-pack acrylic, just as used in the painting of a normal road car. There is nothing special about the paint itself in its normal form; it's how we mess about with the hardener which gets the paint to dry which makes the difference. We have one oven which will dry it in just ten minutes, which means that by the time you have cleaned your spray guns, the tub is dry and you can put your next colour on."

Once the black colour is on, it's time to take one set of masking off and then cover up the black again and put the Benson & Hedges yellow on. "This year's shade of yellow is a complex process," explains Turner. "We start off with a pink coat, followed by greeny yellow. We add some orange in the mixing room and "mist on" four to five coats. You have to be very careful and if you go too far, you have to start all over again. On top of that comes two coats of lacquer."

As with everything in F1, keeping the weight of the car down as low as possible is vital and this even applies to paint. "As a rule, we try and keep the weight down with everything we do" says Turner. "We have always prided ourselves on being the lightest out there, at least until 2000. I'm not sure exactly how much the paint weighs, but I reckon that on a chassis you might put as much as four kilos on."

Once the car is painted, it is rubbed down and polished, using very fine "flatting" paper. "We flatten off all the orange peel effect you can get on normal cars," continues Turner. "On the Jordan, where the black meets the yellow, we smooth that even more so that we match the paint levels, so you cannot feel any joins. It's quite hard with this colour scheme as the black (only two coats) is much lower. Then the tub is brushed up with polishing mops."

TT can turn a car round in 12 hours, which involves three people working on the one chassis.

The work goes on all year round, as every car is stripped and re-painted after every grand prix. "We scrape all the paint off back to the carbon and start again. We use little razor blades with special handles which we use to scrape off the paint down to the primer and then that is rubbed down by hand. It's very labour intensive. All the stickers are applied at the Jordan factory as some decals overlap certain panels so you need to be working on a built up car, which we rarely get up here."

Everyone in the paint shop takes a personal interest in how the Jordan team performs. "When I watch the Grands Prix on television and see one of the cars damaged, it's heartbreaking," laments Turner. "If the team hasn't done well, the atmosphere here on a Monday morning is glum. I had been going 18 months before we landed the Jordan job and I didn't even know it was for Formula One, because it was Eddie Jordan Racing in those days," remembers Turner. "We painted the 7 UP car, the first car they raced and the next week it was a centrespread in Autosport magazine. One of my lads came in and said "that car we painted it's an F1 car.' I said ‘don't be daft and he showed me and it was like all my birthdays had come at once. We have been there ever since. I've still got a model of that car on my desk. It was a beautiful car."


24 Oct 2001