Tucked away in some stunning countryside not a million miles away from York and just up the road from Squires in a small industrial estate the boys at 01RaceFX go about their daily work, for them a day's work is to conceptualize, produce and apply custom livery and design work to customers primarily in race or stunt settings, with a growing client list reading like the who's who of the British Superbikes paddock they have made a massive impact by coming up with a totally unique slant on an age old problem.

With paint livery you have limitations in a number of area's and in the race arena, where a crash is likely to happen at some stage, a fully painted up bike can take some serious damage and cost some serious money to put right. Take a look at trackday junkies or amateur racers and you see a lot of gel coated or sparsely sprayed up bikes and I bet if you asked each one of their owners they would love to have a more complex and personal design but the cost and time implications are just too high, 01RaceFX work with a paint shop but their approach is to wrap the bike in vinyl in a more complicated, but similar process to the effect you see on signwritten vans.

Vinyl has a number of distinct advantages over paint and very few disadvantages by comparison, to start, a panel that has been wrapped in a custom vinyl, be it solid colour or printed with artwork is easy to repair if damaged, the vinyl is peeled off, any scratches or breaks attended to and flattened off then a new vinyl panel is produced and applied - something that can take very little time indeed. From the bikes I got to see on my visit I was amazed at the kind of detail you can put into a design too, the paint guy confirmed that in order to do something similar would be close to impossible if not damn expensive to do. If you take a look at the main image at the top of this article you see a large 01 logo on the tank - look again, surrounding this logo are a ton of small 01's and if you look even closer you will see very fine text underneath this, I unfortunately failed to get a close up shot but let me tell you that it says Zero One in tiny lettering, ask a spray shop to do that!

Watching the guys wrap up Davy Morgan's CSC Branson Bikes was fascinating, with large panels of what appear to be solid colour vinyl going on only to notice that one cut in place they contained fine pinstriping. Colin who runs 01RaceFX told me that the finish you get with vinyl is more cost effective than paint, easier and much faster to repair and retouch but you can sometimes miss out on the finer points of paintwork such as those really deep gloss finishes, if I am honest though I think he may have been selling himself short as the overall quality of finish was amazing. Where vinyl meets other vinyl or paint a fine pinstripe is used to cover any join which you really would only see on a really close inspection anyway and generally you are too busy trying to take in all the fine detailing to notice.

Take the MCUI Medical Bike as a perfect example, 01RaceFX are quite rightly proud to be associated with the MCUI Medical Team, for those of you who (like me) know little about them, they are the unsung heroes of Irish Road Racing events and comprise of two rapid response motorcycles carrying travelling doctors and life saving equipment for when things go wrong, usually these bikes are totally unnoticed which is a real shame as they really deserve all the recognition they can get for the important work they do. 01RaceFX have upped the ante a little though and last year designed them a bike that not only turned heads but got the MCUI Medical Team as much, if not more recognition as some of the race teams!

For 2011 the design has been tweaked, improved and generally brought right up to date - and what a design it has turned out to be too, spectacular and eerie all at the same time - see the photo's at the bottom of the page for during and complete shots to get the picture. If you are looking for something unique for your motorcycle you should give them a call. Typically though 01RaceFX try and concentrate their efforts on the race paddock and operate at around 80% race teams and 20% private jobs but with the real focus on having a custom design and not a race rep rip-off, having such talented designers put to work replicating someone else's design really seems a bit of a waste - that is not to say they won't do something for you though.

One other area these guys are involved in is in branding and merchandising, from their own in-house clothing design and printing service which can produce a team or club's promotional wear right through to creating the sponsors logo's to go on the race suit themselves, we think that 01RaceFX will continue to go from strength to strength as more teams and businesses use their services, and like us, are massively impressed with what they can do, once my current bike has shown its arse and needs replacing with something shiny you can expect to see a 01RaceFX design adorning whatever motor replaces it.

If you are looking for something interesting, durable and easily updated without the massive costs associated with similar paint services or are a race team who want a one stop shop for your branding, design and merchandise you should give them a call,  In 2010 alone, 01RaceFX applied this expertise to the MCUI Medical Team (Irish Superbike), Team CSC Branson (Davy Morgan) along with the Ice Valley BMW S1000RR and the Yamaha R6 of Paul Shoesmith and Ben Wylie’s Stealth 600 Supersport bike of Wylie and Holland Racing.

Visit them at: http://01racefx.com