中文Somewhere in Maranello, a printer quietly changed what a race car can be.
Ahead of the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, HP’s engineers teamed up with Scuderia Ferrari F1 on a special livery — the paint-and-graphics scheme that turns a racing machine into a moving billboard. But this was not a normal wrap job. The design took technical drawings and engineering sketches from the car’s own development and turned them into graphics wrapped across the complex, curved surfaces of a Formula 1 car. And then it hid a secret in plain sight.
The visible livery was printed with HP Latex technology, with HP Z Workstations handling the design and engineering heavy lifting. The substrate stays under wraps (HP won’t say what it is), but the brief was brutal: the materials and processes had to survive the durability and thermal demands of a Grand Prix weekend, where temperatures, speeds, and vibrations would shake apart anything half-baked.
The hidden part is the genuinely cool bit. A separate display car carries graphics printed with HP Indigo’s invisible blue ElectroInk, laid down on an HP Indigo 200K digital press. Under normal light, you see nothing unusual. Under ultraviolet light, the graphics fluoresce blue. It is the kind of trick that feels like a spy movie — except it is real, it is on a Ferrari, and it points at a serious commercial future.
Why should a commercial printer care about a one-off car wrap? Because HP is openly saying this project could expand what is possible with specialty inks. The invisible blue and yellow ElectroInks are not yet officially available for the 200K platform. But the Ferrari work gives HP a real-world testbed. And the company is clear about where it could go: “Adapting invisible blue ink to the HP Indigo 200K platform provides a foundation for exploring further applications, including brand protection features in labels and flexible packaging.”
Read that line twice. Invisible ink on a race car today; invisible security features on a pharmaceutical label or a premium spirits bottle tomorrow. Brand protection is a massive, growing problem — counterfeiting costs legitimate businesses billions, and printers who can offer secure, hard-to-replicate labelling stand out in a crowded market. A fluorescing mark that only appears under UV is exactly the kind of feature a brand owner will pay a premium for.
HP’s Anneliese Olson, president of Imaging, Printing and Solutions, noted that the Ferrari partnership pushed the HP team to explore new possibilities for its technology. That is the quiet value of these showcase projects: they force engineers out of the lab and into a problem with zero tolerance for failure. Ferrari’s head of colour and trim, Silvia Cavallaro, described the livery as celebrating the journey “from idea to reality” — every Ferrari starts as a line on paper, and HP helped tell that story visually.
For print shops, the takeaway is not “go wrap a race car.” It is that the boundary between decorative printing and functional printing keeps blurring. The same digital press that prints your client’s brochure can, with the right ink set, print a security feature. The same latex workflow that wraps a shop window can wrap a vehicle that ends up on a podium. The technology is already further along than most customers realise.
Qualifying for the US Grand Prix began on 23 October, with the race itself on Sunday evening UK time. Somewhere in the garage, a graphics panel was waiting to glow blue under a black light — a small, beautiful reminder that printing’s most interesting work often happens where nobody is looking.
Information source: Printweek (www.printweek.com)
