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In general, the fast-paced evolution of inkjet tech-nology that has facilitated the production of displaygraphics in the past couple of years is attracting morecommercial printers into the sector. With relativelyhigh margins and a low cost of entry, newcomers arehoping to realize the potential of a quick Return OnInvestment when buying any of the dozens of display-graphics machines now available. Many are also find-ing that delving into display graphics is reinvigorating,because the novel opportunities for eye candy that itoffers can make printing fun again.

Of course, before committing to display graphics asa new venture, printers really need to think seriouslyabout how they can apply the technology successfullyto a niche market. Interestingly with this backgroundin mind, my Indy expedition turned up several entre-preneurs who have recently found their niche as wellas their bliss by producing vinyl display graphics forhigh-performance vehicles.

The Italian wrapperIn car racing, Italian heritage has become associatedwith success. Think of car manufacturers Ferrari,Maserati, and Alfa Romeo, or drivers Michael Andrettiand Dario Franchitti, both of whom have won theToronto Indy multiple times. Now add Perry Iannuzzi,one of my most informative sources, who is the ownerand designer at Pure Design Marketing in Markham,Ontario – a 3-person, full-service advertising and de-sign agency. For the past decade, following the evolu-tion of vinyl-printing technology, Pure DesignMarketing has counted the production of automotivegraphics among its services.

In 1975, after graduating from high school at age 17,Iannuzzi started working as a stripper, photographer,and conventional paste-up artist at Corriere Canadese,a still extant Italian-Canadian daily newspaper, then

owned by his grandfather. In 1986, Iannuzzi began experimenting with digital graphics on a Mac com-puter and by 1991 had launched his own communi-cations company, which eventually became PureDesign Marketing. Additionally, since 2001, Iannuzzihas been a racing-car driver himself and currentlyserves as President of the Canadian Automobile SportClubs (CASC) Ontario Region, the province’s officialsanctioning body for motor sports.

Iannuzzi began designing vinyl graphics for racingcars as an offshoot both of his own amateur racing andof decorating vehicles for the road professionally.“When I started, big vinyl printers were cost-prohibi-tive,” he recalls. “The average machine ran about$70,000, so only the big boys could afford it. But as adriver and designer, I was always fussy. I would createmy own artwork in Adobe Illustrator, and send it tothe vinyl-cutting place to be printed. I paid everythingout of my own pocket, and it was costly.

“Eventually, I got tired of paying others to producedecals for me, plus the technology was changing. Vinylprinters became less expensive. And whereas in thepast vehicle graphics consisted of solid colours withno imagery, now people want corporate logos and pic-tures that often require multiple layers of vinyl toachieve the final effect. So, I learned how to producethem myself, bought my own equipment about a yearago, and now I do all the production in-house for myown car and other vehicles.”

Currently Iannuzzi prints vehicle graphics on a 54-inch-wide Roland VP 5401 with inline die cutting.(He also produces large-format applications for floors,walls, and buildings with the same equipment.) Manyof his racing-car jobs only require spot decorationslike stripes and numbers, but sometimes he wraps awhole vehicle in vinyl. He says it is a growing trendamong racing teams to wrap an entire car with vinyl as

by Victoria Gaitskell

18 • PRINTACTION • AUGUST 2011

The New Mechanics of

Race Car Graphicshis summer marked the Honda Toronto Indy’s 25th year

of car racing on the streets surrounding Exhibition Place,along the northern shore of Lake Ontario. This year’s Indy,

consisting of five separate races held over three days in July,billed collectively as Ontario’s largest sporting event, attracted

top drivers from around the world. With them came some of the world’s fastest cars, decorated with some of the most specialized vinyl display graphics, sponsored by many of the world’s wealthiestcorporations. So last month, I visited the Indy to learn more about how printers fit into today’s romantic, esoteric world of car racing.

T

see a lot more fully wrapped cars,” he predicts. “Sincewe wrap our own car, we switch it to a whole differ-ent colour scheme halfway through the season toshow people what we can do, and how we can changethings up. It’s best to lead by example.”

Van Domselaar’s laps for charityWhen it comes to sponsorships, Alberta racing-cardriver James Van Domselaar is a very special case. Nowin his 15th year of racing and like other drivers, he entersraces like the NASCARCanadian Tire Series at theToronto Indy as part of amarketing and advertisingdeal with his sponsors.

Several times a year heeven takes his sponsors’clients and staff for rides ina special 2-seater racing carhe has outfitted especiallyfor this purpose. But inother cases, he charges$250 a pop to take donoursfor rides around a trackstrictly to raise money forcharity. (In exchange, do-nours receive a tax receiptfor the full amount.) Alternatively, Van Domselaarsometimes donates coupons for rides in his 2-seaterat fundraising auctions.

Initially, he became motivated to raise money for theLeukemia and Lymphoma Society of Canada (LLS) in2006 when his wife (who was then three months preg-nant with their second child and had been a memberof his racing team since the time when they were dating) was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Although Van Domselaar is passionate about thesport, racing is just his sideline. He works full time forthe company that is now also his primary sponsor,Steel-Craft Door Products. (Coincidentally, the com-pany’s owner’s first husband passed away from cancer.)Another of Van Domselaar’s corporate sponsors in GusTheoulis, President of Intricco Controls and Automa-tion Ltd. of Pickering, Ontario, a former business col-league who was with Van Domselaar when he firstreceived word of his wife’s diagnosis.

“Before all that happened, with a second child on theway, I was planning on winding down my racing career,”Van Domselaar recalls. “But my wife’s diagnosis was aslap in the face that showed me how quickly life can un-ravel. I decided I wanted to raise awareness and moneyto help the cause, so with the help of the local chair ofLLS, I first did a 35-lap lapathon at the Edmonton Indy,charging a buck a lap via the Internet, that raised$10,000. The next year I put two seats in an older racecar I had that I didn’t want to sell and started offeringthe Ride of a Lifetime promotion that I do now.

“Fortunately, my wife is a survivor, and as we get fur-ther away from her illness, we’ve started to forget thatcrisis in our lives. It’s God’s way of healing,” he says.

Subsequently, his racing team has become involvedwith other charitable causes, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Canada, the United Way ofCanada, and others that have seen his humanitarianwork and approached him for help.

“We’re not the fastest guys on the track,” Van Domselaar admits. “My team consists of my familyand friends. We don’t try to compete against the bighitters, although this year we’re more competitivethan last year. I actually had a good thing going at this

year’s Toronto Indy until I had a bit of a run-in withthe tire wall,” he laughs.

Van Domselaar lives in his family’s longtime home-town of Fort Saskatchewan (15 minutes from Edmon-ton) and, like other racers, benefits from work donatedby local businesses, including vehicle graphics fromAdvantage Signs, the local sign shop. “The red part ofthe car is paint, but they wrapped the rest of it,” he con-firms, “and last year they wrapped our hauler, a 44-foottrailer. It was a pretty big job. Right now they’re puttingstripes on the truck that pulls the trailer.”

Graphiti.ca’s custom car finishesA feature popular with visitors to the Toronto Indy isThunder Alley, an outdoor area where food and bev-erage vendors and other exhibitors display theirwares. Prominent among them this year was a largebooth belonging to Graphiti.ca, a business aimed at

the consumer market and launched six months agoby company President Dan Maher. It specializes indesigner vinyl wraps for cars, specifically targeting asits customers owners of high-end new cars who wanta custom finish.

Graphiti.ca shares a Mississauga premises withMaher’s other, older company, IdentifyYourself.ca, thecommercial arm of Maher’s business. The older com-pany’s activities include producing large-formatgraphics for national and international retailers andcorporations with fleets, as well as large-format tradeservices. IdentifyYourself.ca has existed for 20 years,was incorporated in 1996, employs a staff of 10, andproduced Graphiti.ca’s booth at the Indy and all its contents.

“We’ve actually been in the vehicle-wrap businessfor 15 years,” recounts Maher, “but six months ago,when 3M developed its Series 1080 Scotchprint WrapFilm, we entered into a strategic partnership withthem by forming Graphiti.ca as an exclusively 3Mcompany. Their new 1080 substrate allows for a vari-ety of finishes – including matte and imitations ofcarbon fibre and brushed metal – that provide styleand protection for cars, cost effectively.”

Although Maher admitsit is hard to pinpoint thecost of average jobs, he saysthe wraps for consumer vehicles start at $2,500 andestimates that a high-endcar paint job might cost$10,000 to $15,000, whilean equivalent wrap jobmight cost half thatamount. His consumer vehicle wraps take three tofive days to install and arewarranted for three years,but Maher estimates theycould last up to five yearswith proper care. (Basically,he says car owners can treat

them like any other vehicle, except waxing must berestricted to sprays rather than buffing.)

As much of a car fanatic as my other two interviewsubjects, Maher lights up when he recalls one of his recent challenges: Wrapping a McLaren (a sports carcosting the same as a house) in brushed-gold-finish vinyl.

Iannuzzi sums up his automotive passion as follows:“There’s no feeling like whipping around a race trackin a high-performance car. As a business owner, Ihaven’t had a vacation in 15 years. I’m always tied upwith payables and receivables and can’t leave that bag-gage behind. But when I’m on the track, the last thingon my mind is business; the first thing on my mind isgetting to the front of the pack. It’s a nice outlet to letyour aggression go and see what you’re made of.”

Victoria Gaitskell is keen to exchange ideas with readers atvictoria@printaction.com

These two Nissan Sentras are actually one and the same, just with a different wrap.

a base colour, and then stick decorative and sponsors’decals on top – “That way, if you lose a sponsorhalfway through the season, you just peel that spon-sor’s name off. You don’t have to touch the whole car.

“Installs, especially ones where you’re covering thewhole side of a car with a wrap 54 inches tall by 16feet long, take a good eye for lining things up, as wellas specialized training,” he continues. “Mainly thesuccess of the operation depends on what’s called air-release technology, in which the adhesive on the backof the vinyl allows for repositioning because it has airchannels that prevent it from sticking until you pressdown on it with a squeegee. 3M is the company at theforefront of air-release technology. They also trainpeople in wrap design and basic and advanced in-stallation and certify them as 3M Preferred GraphicsInstallers.” By Iannuzzi’s standards, only a dozen top-flight installers exist in all of Canada.

He estimates that the average car wrap costs thebuyer between, roughly, $2,000 to $3,000: “It mightcost $4,000 to paint a car, but you can wrap it for halfto three-quarters of that cost, and it takes half thetime. Now there are so many different colours andbeautiful styles of artwork to choose from that wrapscan really make the cars stand out. It’s the wave of thefuture. It’s already being done on cars in the NASCARCanadian Tire Series – vehicles that are constantlycrashing and replacing their graphics and parts.When they wrap their cars, most of them print two orthree extra copies of the wrap for spares, so they caneasily replace damage to look like the car has neverbeen hit.”

So far, Iannuzzi’s in-house vehicle-wrapping proj-ects have included referrals from the Castrol Cana-dian Touring Car Championship racing series andwraps for a Toronto ad agency much larger than hiswith no production facilities and a major automotiveaccount. “The investment in the printer was a bigjump, and I’ve been waiting for all the sexy orders forwild and colourful racing-car designs to roll in. In-stead, I’ve mostly been getting more orders for thingslike furniture-store trucks, but they pay the bills,” heconfesses.

Racing sponsorship revealedAs another of its services, Iannuzzi’s agency preparesrace-sponsorship programs for use by other racers asmarketing tools to attract sponsors. “We explain toracers that it’s not just a matter of telling sponsors‘Give me money, and I’ll put your logo on my car.’ Ialso suggest they take the Yellow Pages, make a list ofall the automotive-related companies, and then throwthat list away, because racers have already solicitedthose companies to death. Instead, they need to sell anadvertising opportunity that will work for any typeof business by helping the prospective sponsor sellmore of whatever products they make.

“Most sponsors find racing exciting and like theopportunities to bring clients to the track and havetheir logo on TV, but the driver’s race results are

secondary. What’s more important is that the sponsor’s customers fall within the demographics forcar-racing fans, who tend to be loyal and are typically25- to 40-year-old males with a high-school educa-tion and an annual income over $50,000. Racers mustlook for sponsors of any sort—motels, fast-foodchains, or whatever – that sell into that demographic,”Iannuzzi emphasizes.

He details how amateur racers sell real estate ontheir cars based on the value of each sponsorship: Primary sponsors might contribute, say, $10,000 toplace their logo on the hood and rear quarter panels(above the rear wheels) of the car and the trailer thattransports it. Secondary sponsors might pay $5,000for a location like the car’s front bumper (which hesays is also a good spot because it features frequentlyin TV and sports photos), while auxiliary sponsorsmight pay $2,500 to place their logos on other partsof the car.

As a designer, Iannuzzi’s job is to work with racingteams to incorporate sponsors’ logos, the team’scolours, and a basic design scheme (such as stripes orflames) into an artistic whole. He confirms that inthis process the main sponsor’s colours and place-ment come first. So if the primary sponsor’s logo isbrown and orange, although the team’s preferredcolours may be purple and green, the latter must bechanged if there is any possibility of clashing with themain sponsor’s logo. When the design is complete,Iannuzzi runs test prints for colour accuracy, then

both the sponsor and the team must approve theproject before installers wrap the car.

Iannuzzi further explains how racing sponsorshipswork, starting with the fact that in Canada there arethree levels of racing: “First is the amateur, grassrootsmotorsports I race in, comprised of private individ-uals like me who want track time.” Iannuzzi estimatesthat each racing weekend in his series, called the GTSprints Presented by Toyotires Championship, costshim around $375 in entry fees, $200 for fuel, $100 foroil and incidentals, $1,200 for a set of tires everyweekend or two, and $150 to lease a truck and trailer.

Then of course, racers must also shell out moniesfor transportation, accommodation, and food – “in-cluding a victory celebration if we’re lucky” – for themembers of their team (Iannuzzi has five people onboard), as well as those not-so-lucky circumstanceswhen they blow an engine or transmission, or requireany number of mechanical fixes. For Iannuzzi andother racers of the GT Sprints series, these costs andallowances are multiplied over the eight weekends oftheir season.

“In the end, it all averages about $30,000 a year,”says Iannuzzi. “My own company foots the bill, but Itry to offset costs as much as possible with sponsor-ships. The sponsorships are not always cash; they canalso be services. For example, our machine shop do-nates about $10,000 worth of work.

“Second, there’s the intermediate, semi-profes-sional level of racing, which might cost average driv-ers around $60,000 to $70,000 per year. But the carsin what we call ‘the pointy end of the field,’ meaningfirst-place or second-place cars, are there because theyspend a lot more money, and their teams are beingpaid. They would invest around $200,000 a year.

“Third are the professional or paid drivers inNASCAR whose costs run at least $3 million a year.While amateurs pay out of their own pocket, most ofthese drivers don’t. Rather, they buy their rides bybringing their own sponsorships to the team, so theycan all get paid.

“An exception is the U.S. NASCAR Series, where alarge corporation might pay in the neighbourhoodof $20 million a year to run a car, of which the drivermight get $5 million. On top of that, drivers earnprize money, and multiple additional sponsors whoeach pay them sums of $2, $4, or $5 million are notuncommon. But earnings aren’t that high in Canada,where no series is as big as anything in the U.S.”

Iannuzzi admits: “At first, when I got involved inwrapping cars, I was optimistic that more racing-cardrivers would readily pay money to wrap their cars.But my fellow amateur drivers fight for every dollar,and the money must go into the car and the teamfirst. Wrapping is a luxury. So amateurs tend to askme to wrap their cars for free in exchange for pro-motion instead of paying for it. But I’m trying to sellthe wraps, not give them away.

“Nevertheless, they are becoming more and morepopular. In two to three years, I think we’re going to

Perry Iannuzzi of Pure Design Marketing.