_{*Quick Summary: The author’s mailbox was painted as a test panel for the Jeff Gordon “Firestorm” black paint.*}

My mailbox is cooler than yours. It was painted with a prototype car paint from DuPont as a test panel for Jeff Gordon’s new “FireStorm” paint scheme. 

Jeff is always very involved in how his cars look. In the Hendrick Motorsports Showcar Department, we keep him in the loop as we make changes to all of his new schemes before we hand them over to the team. Part of that process is creating the paint colors based on the information we are given from the artist that designed the scheme. 

They needed something curved to paint as a test panel because the paint we selected has reflective particles in it. The curve shows off the reflective particles much better than a flat panel. There are a lot of variables when painting with reflective particles. The size of the particles, the quantity you add to the paint, and all sorts of other stuff. My mailbox needed to be painted and they needed something curved, so when the painter asked everybody if we knew of anything curved like that sitting around the shop, I spoke up, and he loved the idea. I ran home and got my mailbox.

After it was painted last August, Edd Stonich and the other decision making executives at DuPont came from Wilmington, Delaware and looked at my mailbox. They loved it, Rick Hendrick looked at it and loved it, then they took it to the race track at Bristol for Jeff to look at it. He loved it, so that ended up being the color. With that, painter Tony Bunnell quipped – “Lots of people have painted their mailbox to look like Jeff Gordon’s race car, but you’re the only person in the world that Jeff Gordon painted his race car to match their mailbox.”

It is very hard to capture the beauty of this paint in a photo, and these pics sure don’t do it justice.