Hi,

We absolutely plan on driving the One:1 in anger. We have have some really exciting plans to film with the car over the next 12 months or so to show you what it can do.

The blue certainly appears darker in the shots but it will be really brighten up in direct sunlight.

 

I hope this is not a dumb question, but what exactly is tint? is it like a coloured clear coat? If so how does it remain see through? It would be nice to have the product / process explained.

 

You are exactly right; it is a coloured clear coat. The idea sounds simple but the application is very difficult.

Unlike a normal paint job you cannot correct issues with the body using filler before you paint as it would show up in the final result. The body has to be perfect first. A carbon body can be sanded a little to remove imperfections.

The paint itself is a little like ink, it’s translucent. You can see thought it. The biggest issues is the more layers you paint, the opaque the colour gets, therefore you have to apply exactly the same amount of paint across the whole car or the finish will be patchy. You then apply a normal clear coat to seal the finish. I hope that makes sense.

These paints are normally referred to as "candies"

 

Thanks for the clarification, that's what I kind of figured. Except I still cant get my head around how its translucent.
I spoke with the Bugatti representative at Geneva a few years ago and he said one could only do blue, green and bronze tints. Which I took to mean they were the only ones possible. Though in hindsight I think he meant that's all Bugatti offered at the time.

As I know you can get Purple and I see Pagani are about to do red and gold tints on the Huyara Dinastia. I guess you can have what ever colour you want. Anyhow thanks again for the clarification.

 

You can't have White because that just makes it grey. I have been told by someone at Pagani

 

Ok maybe this will help, imagine a liquid version of a pair of tinted sunglasses lenses. If you look through the lenses every thing you see will have a tint to it be it red blue or whatever. Now if you took one lense out and placed it in front of the other, you would still be able to see through it but the tint and colour would be a lot darker. The same theory applies to these paint jobs.

The paint technology is not new; it has been around since the mid 60's

 

Thanks streetrod454 that makes sense, I did not know tint technology was that old, I assumed it was something that has arisen since the advent of bare carbon bodywork, after all why would you want tint on metal bodywork as opposed to paint?

 

silver is possible, like on the TreVita, although i belive it's not a tint, but rather the colour of the carbonfibre itself with a regular clear coat applied to it. Probally insanely expensive to make, but looks absolutley stunning.

 

Again here is an example. The last car I painted used these same candy paints. As the paint is translucent its final colour is dependent upon what is underneath. So I used metallic silver and gold as base layers for the graphics on the car with the rest of the body sprayed black. I then applied candy red over the whole car. As a result the main body of the car came out a very deep maroon colour but the graphics came up two different shades of red.

A candy paint job's final colour is always dependent on what colour or not in a bare carbon car is sprayed on first.

 

As been mentioned the tints look very different under different light sources. Here's the difference between a cloudy and a sunny day Tricolore.