How much does it cost to paint a Nascar Sprint Cup car?

Answer 1

They're not painted. They're wrapped. A company called Speedpro Imaging prints huge sheets of vinyl, which are applied to the cars in a matter of hours at a cost of about $3000. It costs about four times that to decorate a Sprint Cup car with paint.

The big advantage of wrapping over painting isn't money. You can't just decorate a car and send it out on the track. The paint schemes have to be approved by a lot of people. The sponsor's lawyers and advertising department, a lot of people at the team shop (lawyers, the team owner, the driver), the track, NASCAR...it takes a long time to get the approvals you need and any one of those entities can send your design back to the beginning. If you have a single-race paint scheme planned out fpr this week's race and you want to run that car in next week's race, your paint shop will have the car long enough that you won't have much time to prepare it mechanically. (Which is why they didn't use single-race paint schemes for most races before everyone started wrapping them.) And if NASCAR decides your brand of car is too good and changes it to slow you down - which they will do with no provocation - after you've painted a car for a race, you're in for some work. With wraps, the design shop can send the completed wrap design out as a PDF for approvals, then print that exact thing out for two cars and ship it in a box to the race team. You can plan out an entire season's paint schemes far in advance, receive the vinyl long before you need it, and apply it just before you put the car in the hauler.