Idle thoughts about wheel colour
A cold winter night leads to some consideration about changing the colour of the wheels
It's way too cold to even think about taking the Daytona out on the road at the moment. The roads are still covered in salt, and even if they weren't the chilly ambient air temperatures make it tough to get any reasonable oil temperature in the car. During the weather enforced down time thoughts turn to repairs, upgrades and modifications. One thing I have been pondering is another set of wheels for the car? The Daytona runs on it's original 15" Cromodora wheels finished in the standard silver colour. As these wheels are forty three years old now perhaps it might be sensible to use a set of modern replicas for general driving and longer distance touring. There are several options for replicas, Eurospares offer replicas of the Cromodoras, while Roelofs Engineering in the Netherlands make replicas of the Campagnolo wheels used on the Daytona race cars. A more left field choice would be the 17" replacement wheels Group 4 wheels make for the Ferrari 512BBi.
Whichever I were to go for, the other question would be what colour to paint them? Whilst the vast majority of Daytona's run on the standard silver wheels like mine, a few cars sport gold wheels and this was often the colour of choice for the racing versions. The purists would now doubt say stick with the silver and preserve the originality. However this is my car and not the purists. It is not a car I plan to sell in my lifetime so why not personalise it a bit and have the wheels finished in a different shade from standard?
To model how the different colour choices would look the sensible thing to do would be to play with a picture of the car in Photoshop. Trouble is I'm not the greatest photoshopper and this is at the moment only a thought to wile away a lazy Sunday afternoon. A quicker solution was to use the design editor option in the Xbox One game Forza Horizon 3.
The Daytona is a playable car in the game (although it is only available in the earlier plexiglass front configuration which is not an issue when it come to the wheels. Firstly I widened the rear wheels slightly as if I did go for another set almost certainly I would adopt the wider 9" rears that many Daytonas sport. Once this was done, using the game's photo mode, I took a picture of the car with the standard wheel colour.
Standard wheel colour in Forza Horizon 3
The next thing was to go to the editor and choose some colours. Initially it didn't go well. The editor in the game does not pick up that the centre hub and spinner are finished in chrome and painted them as well. Carrying on though I tried the closest colour I could get to gold in the standard colour pallette.
Gold painted wheels
They came out looking more than a little meh and rather yellow. so instead I tried a more bronze looking colour.
Bronze painted wheels
This was better but still not what I was looking for. Next I thought about black wheels. To be honest I'm not a fan of this relatively modern phenomenon of solid gloss black painted alloys on cars as it almost always spoils the lines of a car so I actually picked a very dark grey.
Dark Grey
I think not for the Daytona. I was getting a bit disheartened at this point, but then I remembered under the special colour choices in the editor, there were some metal finishes. Firstly I looked at the gold platted option.
Gold plate err no
Gold plate might work on a custom Range Rover (actually it doesn't work there either to be honest) but not on a classic and classy Ferrari Daytona. Next I tried the brushed Zinc colour.
Brushed zinc
That was much more like it, not too bling but the problem was the colour doesn't blend that well with the rosso paint colour, so it was onto trying the brushed copper.
Brushed copper
Now we were talking. different and less outrageous than the gold plate it blends really well with the red. However I tried one more option the brushed steel.
Brushed steel
This surprisingly works really well. I thought it might be too dark again but actually it reminded me of the wheel colour on my friend (and founder of Petrolicious) Afshin Behnia's red Alfa Romeo GTV. I thought the combination of a dark matte or metallic colour with the red worked really well on his classic Alfa (you can see his car here petrolicious.com/a-tale-of-two-gtvs) and this mock up on Forza worked well too.
Obviously both the brushed copper and steel colours will almost certainly look totally different when applied in the real world to the Daytona but it has given me some ideas to think about and maybe take to the next stage too try something like these colours in Photoshop.
At the moment this whole idea is idle musings to fill up a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon (the whole effort above took about twenty minutes), if and when I get around to getting a set of replicas for the car I'll give this some more consideration.
Join In
Comments (1)
Brushed copper gets my vote, though I do actually like the bronze ones too.