中文There’s a moment in motorsport where art and engineering collide at 300 km/h. At the US Grand Prix in Texas, HP and Scuderia Ferrari gave that collision a secret.
Hidden among the livery racing around the Circuit of the Americas was graphics you couldn’t see — until you shone ultraviolet light on them. Under UV, they bloomed blue. HP engineers had taken an invisible blue ink and adapted it for the HP Indigo 200K Digital Press, then refined its application across the car’s curved, unforgiving bodywork. The result was a dedicated display car with a hidden layer most fans never knew existed.
Why bother painting secrets on a race car? Because the same trick that hides a logo in plain sight is, in HP’s words, a window into “anti-counterfeit brand protection for labels and packaging.” Think about it: if you can embed an invisible marker that only reveals itself under UV, you’ve got a weapon against the fakes flooding global supply chains — from luxury goods to medicines to, yes, packaging.
The collaboration was more than a paint job. HP Latex printing technology and vehicle-wrapping know-how got the graphics onto complex bodywork and kept them there through a full F1 weekend of heat, vibration, and speed. HP Z Workstations handled the digital design and engineering, translating Ferrari’s creative concept into something physical. And the work pulled together Ferrari’s team in Maranello and HP’s engineers in Barcelona through endless testing and refinement — a reminder that even a “fun” project is a serious cross-continental engineering effort.
HP is explicit that this isn’t just about sport. The combinations of primers, inks, and wrapping materials tested for Austin could feed future customer development projects across packaging, commercial printing, and brand protection. The lesson from a race car travels straight to a supermarket shelf: a package that carries an invisible, verifiable signature is a package a brand can trust and a counterfeiter can’t easily copy.
For the print industry, this is the exciting edge of where our craft is heading. We’re not just putting pretty pictures on boxes anymore. We’re building silent security features into the very surface of products — features that fight fraud without adding a visible gram of weight or cost to the design.
Next time you pick up a premium product, imagine what might be hiding in the ink. Thanks to a Ferrari and a clever shade of blue, the future of fighting fakes might be something you can only see in the dark.
Source: Print21 (by Wayne Robinson, published 28 October 2026).
