RaceWraps: Devil is definitely in detailing

This is the second of a two-part series on how car graphics are created through vinyl wrappers.

Is it paint, or is it a Motorsports Designs RaceWrap?

Whichever it is, you'll have to be right up next to the car to tell the difference, according to Tim Cecil, the leader of the application team at Motorsports Designs home office in High Point, N.C.

"The materials we are using these days are what make the RaceWrap possible," Cecil said. "With as few seams as we have, it winds up looking like it's one solid sheet of vinyl."

Cecil is one of the guys who can take a car in any stage of dress -- paint, primer, decals on, decals off -- and make it look like a completely different car in a little under two hours. That's how long it takes, he said, with two people applying the wrap and no problems.

"With two people, if everything goes absolutely perfect, wrapping a car can be done in a little under two hours," he said. "Some of the most difficult ones we have, really detailed stuff, they can take up to three hours, sometimes three and a half.

"Naturally, we like to have as much as possible built into the wrap so that once we apply it, we're done, but quarterpanels usually have to be applied separately. If there are any neon colors, they have to be applied separately after the wrap is done."

Compared to painting the cars, it's a no-brainer. With prep work and curing and all the assorted things you have to do to paint a car these days, it takes about three times as long as wrapping, and that's best-case.

Sure, you might think applying what amounts to a full-body decal is not all that difficult.

You'd be wrong.

"When we go on site, we have templates that are very specific," Cecil said. "We have a roof panel, hood, deck lid, TV panel, two sides and a nose kit. We will always start with the roof, hood, deck lid and TV panel so that the edges of the overlaps when you put the sides on don't get caught by the wind."

The individual items -- roof, hood, deck lid, TV panel -- are affixed first, then the sides are hung to tie it all together.

"For the sides, we have two people," he said. "We'll lay the sides up there, and most of the time we have the numbers built in and the stripes built in, if there are any. We line it up with the bottom of the car and make sure the number falls in the right place. Then we put a piece of tape in the center, over the door window (not the window that corresponds to the rear), take half of it and fold it back over, pull the backing paper off to expose the adhesive. We cut and remove that. One person swings around and attaches the side at the rear.

"We'll take our squeegee and from where we cut the backing paper, we'll make a path all the way down to where we had our tape marker. When we're done with that, we do the same thing with the front, and the whole side is hanging there from the single path that we've made.

"We work from that to the bottom of the car to the top, from that one horizontal line. The nose is always last, because we need it to overlap onto the sides so that no air picks it up."

The RaceWrap first came into being when Darrell Waltrip wanted a "chrome" car back in his Western Auto days. John McKenzie and his team at MSD did that for ol' D.W., and MSD has been at it ever since, refining the process and making it a product of its own.

Lest you think it's the same-old, same-old, think again. Materials keep getting better, as do the printers which take huge Vector-based computer graphics and translate them into vinyl. Even the adhesive is manufactured just so.

"The material we're using now has an air-release technology, which is accomplished with very small grooves in the adhesive so you leave the air somewhere to go," Cecil said.

"You can push wrinkles, you can push bubbles, you can stretch it over the car and then squeegee it. Before, you would have to have held it off the car and squeegee it while someone held it in front of you. That's what makes the time difference."

It's a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea. Motorsports Designs pioneered this technology, and through constant improvements, it's the wrap to have in NASCAR.

Cecil and his applicators will have done more than 120 trailers before a wheel turns at Daytona. This is the busy time for them.

"We'll be going 12-hour days up until the end of February," Cecil said. "Last year we did 110-130 trailers in six weeks, with seven people. It's going really hard here. Before you know it, we have trailers everywhere."

Most of the time, Cecil is floating around the shops MSD services, wrapping cars. But when Daytona rolls around, there's travel of a different nature.

"We do go to the track occasionally, like at Daytona, for instance. One installer will go down there for five to seven days to take care of odds and ends and make sure everybody has what they need for all the last-minute changes and stuff.

"It's not uncommon to get called out at any time to just about anything at the last minute."

Movies are also good for business at MSD.

"At one point we had seven people on the application team, and we were doing the cars for the Talladega Nights movie," Cecil said. "We had at least four or five cars a day for a week. We were knocking it out; those were pretty long days."

Asked which car gave him the most trouble, Cecil thought a minute before answering.

"The Charger front end is the worst, right now," he said. "It was in 2006, but it looks a little better in '07. Superspeedway cars are by far the easiest, because they have less shape to them. Short-track cars, some of them, you can stand in front of them and it looks like somebody twisted the car. Those are kind of tough sometimes.

"The rear panels are all about the same. The Monte Carlo would be second-hardest, because they have a pretty hard wedge to them."

The devil, it is said, is in the details, and detailing RaceWraps for the majority of the field is one of those details that can be devilish.

Look closely next time you see a NASCAR stock car from a short distance. Look for the seams, usually around where the license plate would be on a passenger car. Sometimes you can see where the sides come together.

Sometimes you can't, and that's where the questions begin: is it RaceWrap or is it paint?