HP & Ferrari develop blueprint for success
HP’s work with Scuderia Ferrari HP on a special Ferrari livery project for a display car rolled out at the US Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, brought together two printing technologies to meet very different demands, with lessons that can now be extended into labels and flexible packaging.
A design that appears as a black-and-white drawing in ordinary light, then fluoresces blue under ultraviolet light, sets an unusual brief for a printing team. Apply it to the contours of a Formula 1 show car and the challenge becomes more demanding. The printed material must take on a complex shape while retaining both the image and the effect.
Haim Levit, Senior Vice President and Division President, HP Graphics Solutions Business, says: “The most valuable innovation doesn’t end with a single application. Our partnership with Scuderia Ferrari HP gave us an exacting creative challenge that brought together expertise from across HP Graphics and pushed us to think differently about what our technology can do. The knowledge we have gained as a result of this collaboration – from materials and inks to new production possibilities – can now be taken back to our customers, helping them differentiate their print, expand into new applications and create greater value.”
Ferrari conceived and designed the new livery for its Austin-bound FI display car, which revealed the drawings and engineering normally hidden by the bodywork, The idea was to recognise the people behind the car’s development and that idea was expanded even further through use of blueprint graphics as part of the livery, and through the display car’s hidden UV-responsive imagery. The show car’s transformation under UV light began with Invisible Blue ink. HP drew on its existing expertise in printing processes, chemistry and inks to enable its use on the HP Indigo 200K specifically for this project.
Invisible inks already form part of HP Indigo Secure, the company’s security printing portfolio. In that setting, inks revealed by UV light are used for brand protection, authentication and track-and-trace applications.
For the Ferrari brief, the inks also needed to be combined with an unconventional vehicle-wrapping material. HP’s engineers evaluated print modes, primer chemistries and wrapping substrates to address adhesion, durability and flexibility. Initial testing established that the selected material, ink and printing process could work together. The next challenge was to make the printed substrate conform to the car’s bodywork without the ink cracking or delaminating.
HP Z Workstations supported the digital design and engineering workflows used to map Ferrari’s artwork onto the car’s bodywork. The teams refined software, templates and print files, using tests on the vehicle to assess how the printed material behaved once applied.
Those tests informed adjustments to the position, overlay and coverage of the black and UV inks. Artwork and print parameters were refined together to achieve the intended appearance under both lighting conditions.
The race cars presented a separate set of requirements. Here, HP used its established vehicle-wrapping expertise and HP Latex technology to reproduce Ferrari’s detailed, blueprint-inspired graphics consistently across the bodywork. The materials and processes were designed to meet the durability and thermal performance demands of a Formula 1 race weekend, extending the companies’ ongoing collaboration on digitally printed race liveries.
HP says collaboration across its Graphics teams helped it explore development processes on a shorter timescale than would normally have been possible.
For HP Indigo customers, the potential now extends into labels and flexible packaging. HP says the testing expanded its understanding of Invisible Blue on the Indigo 200K and how primers, inks and substrates work together. Further development could allow printers to combine distinctive visual effects with brand protection on the same printed product.
