Painting the town red… and yellow

Jean Paul Nulens runs Publi Belgium Europe, the company that produces and places all of the advertising banners and grass painting seen on Formula One tracks today. At Silverstone this year, Jean Paul and his team were charged with painting two enormous Shell pectens on the grass inside the last few corners of the lap and Shell took the opportunity to catch up with one of Formula One’s hidden secrets.

“At each race, we have around 6,000-7,000m2 of advertising around the track, and that can vary depending on where we are and how the television cameras are positioned,” explains Jean Paul. At Silverstone, the two Shell pectens were placed on two of the most exciting corners of the circuit, Luffield and Brooklands. Yet whilst painting on the grass may seem childishly simple, as with everything in Formula One, it is not as easy as it looks.

“The position of the logo is not hit and miss,” says Jean Paul. “It is a feeling, I am trying to teach my son about the positioning of adverts and logos, but it is not easy to teach. I would say that choosing the sites for adverts around a circuit is more about feeling and experience than anything else. For grass painting as we are doing with this Shell pecten, I need to choose a spot that will remain consistent with the cameras. Cameras on cranes for example are no good as they are never exactly in the same place day after day. At Brooklands, we have a good camera position which will be used a lot during the weekend’s racing.”

When Jean Paul and his team are happy with the location of the grass painting, their next challenge is to paint the pecten in such a way that it is at its most visible. However, as the pecten will be painted on the ground, and the camera will be up high up, the team paints the logo so that it will appear to be perfectly aligned with the television cameras when the cars pass.

Using a laser, the team electronically projects the Shell pecten onto the ground. Then, the team marks out the exact dimensions of the image. Whilst the Shell logo appears in a camera’s viewfinder as a perfect square, on the ground it is nearly 37 metres long and only a few metres wide. The pecten is marked out with nails placed in the ground, and strings to denote the lines. With the shape marked, the spray team arrives, ready to add colour to the template.

Red is the first colour to be laid. Two painters work their way around the shape in the ground, keeping perfectly with the lines of string. When red is dry, yellow is applied, followed finally by with white. “White and yellow are two of the hardest colours to use,” explains one of Jean Paul’s team. “With most colours we can simply paint over others, but yellow and white are transparent and we have to be deadly accurate.”

When the pecten is finally finished, the night is drawing in and the team’s hard work is threatened by the incoming rain. Nevertheless, the following day the rain holds off long enough to show the pecten in its full glory as the cars come out to practice.

Logos on the grass are similar to ice sculptures, when all the hard work is done, the result is impressive yet in a short period of time, there is no trace left of the what once was. “The paint is entirely water based,” says Jean Paul. “No matter how much we paint on the grass, when the rain comes and the grass is cut, the logo will disappear after the race. My next project is to find a way of painting logos onto the track itself. I have found the right paint, and our next job is to find a safe and environmental way of removing it!”