There was a saying around years ago, when I wore a younger man’s clothes “Go faster stripes don’t actually make your car go faster, but it looks like you are going faster”.
Cars like the Mini Cooper S, or the Mustang, or Monaro – all looked like stock cars when tricked up to have the appeal or appearance of a street racer. They usually consisted of a black and white stripe combination that went from front to back of the car.
Go Faster Stripes
On the bonnet, over the roof and through to the boot.
They were typically hand painted stripes and made your car like “tricked up”, which today would be described as “pimped up” or simply “pimped”. Back then hand spray painting cars was how you did it, it was time consuming and required the skills of a spray painter.
Today when you want to add something like “Go Faster Stripes”, you would typically use an adhesive based vinyl transfer. Vehicle graphics for advertising purposes are now able to be applied with this process that is described as a vehicle wrap.
Full Car Vehicle Wraps
Special effects or custom paint affects can often be achieved by using a full car body wrap, that is both faster and less expensive spray painting the car completely. A typical effect you see on some commercial vehicles such as the Red Bull mobile DJ four by fours, have a mat black treatment with the Red Bull logo and branding applied on top of this.
But Do They Make You Go Faster?
Now back to our original question, can go faster stripes actually make your car go faster or is it all for show? Let’s be real, wouldn’t it be better to appearing to go faster without actually going faster? Think of the lower numbers of speeding fines you would be paying. Back before speed camera’s and to a lesser extent speed radars, the safety aspect of driving within the speed limits still applied, just as it does today.
Vehicle wraps and graphics may not actually make you go faster but if they are applied to your branded company vehicles, such as your trade vans, it just might make your brand gain more recognition, which will indeed give you a greater boost to your speed of growing your company faster.
Now if we are to consider the aspect of how a graphic can indeed make a car look like it is going faster, all we need do is take a look at the image below:
Go faster stripes work visually, as like the background in the image above, they look like speed lines or blurred scenery passing by. So although the speedometer is saying the same thing, to all and sundry as you go by, it will look like you are “speeding” by.
Now just make sure you do have this effect on an old school policeman parked behind a roadside billboard.