Axalta Coating Systems an Official Team Supplier to Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport

Axalta Coating Systems is an Official Team Supplier to Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport. Spies Hecker, one of Axalta’s premium refinish paint brands, for more than four years has been responsible for the paint on the previous championship-winning Silver Arrows as well as on this year’s car, the Mercedes-AMG F1 W09 EQ Power+.
 
“Unlike most body shops, we know the exact colors we will be working with all season,” said Andrew Moody, head of paint and graphics for Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport.
 
Between the main Permahyd Hi-TEC 480 basecoat highly reflective silver color – a color developed by the team with Spies Hecker in 2013 called Stirling Silver, named after Sir Stirling Moss who drove for Mercedes-Benz in 1955 – to the black, there are four additional silver tones, graded one to four, none of which are commercially available.
 
“There are around 100 different components in rotation at any given time, plus all the spares that go to each race, so we are faced with a unique set of challenges, not least of which is scale,” Moody said. “We mix Stirling Silver in 12 liter batches, which would be ridiculous in a normal body shop.”
 
While the finished look of the Mercedes-AMG F1 W09 EQ Power+ is important, “For us everything is ultimately about weight and aerodynamics,” Moody said. “The acceptable tolerances for an aerodynamic part might be 0.3mm, which would be miniscule for most refinishers. But what we share with many body shops across the world is that we rely on the excellent reliability, consistency and speed of application from Spies Hecker.”