F1 teams strip off the paint to go faster

LONDON : Formula One teams seeking to go faster have been stripping paint from the cars they revealed with pride before the season started.

McLaren, Aston Martin and Williams were among those at last weekend's Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in Imola with notable expanses of raw, black carbon fibre replacing previously liveried areas.

New rules for 2022, with the introduction of larger wheels and an increased use of standard parts, have left some struggling to get down to a new minimum weight limit of 798kg.

Every excess 10kg translates into about 0.3 seconds of lost time per lap.

"With the halo, the bigger tyres, the longer cars, we were all overweight. I think all but maybe one team," McLaren boss Zak Brown told Reuters.

"When you’re overweight you do everything you can to save anything you can. And it’s all incremental."

Brown said some sponsorship deals, such as McLaren's with Google's Android, had accelerated the process of stripping paint.

"Our engine cover was initially papaya but that was before we landed Google as a partner. We took the opportunity: “Hey, you want black? Fantastic’," he said.

"We didn’t modify anything that wasn’t kind of in line with our brand or what a partner wanted. But it saved some weight. Not a lot but it’s about finding a little bit in a lot of different places."

Saving weight by going back to bare metal, or carbon fibre, has a long history in motor racing.

According to lore, the original 1930s Mercedes 'Silver Arrows' acquired their nickname when the cars raced with bare aluminium bodies after the team removed lead-based paint to shave off a kilo and come in under a maximum weight.

The paint on a Formula One car weighs around 6kg, according to Alfa Romeo team manager Beat Zehnder.

Aston Martin's