Anduril's #24 Paint Scheme Drops for San Diego
BoS got the exclusive first look at the paint scheme William Byron will run at the inaugural Anduril 250
Anduril unveiled the primary paint scheme for William Byron’s No. 24 Chevrolet today. Business of Speed got the sneak peek, the team, and the design rationale ahead of next month’s Anduril 250 Race the Base.
The car looks like a piece of Anduril hardware. And that’s the entire point. It’s part of the greater Anduril world.
The driver door carries Anduril’s actual product-spec typography: “ANDURIL INDUSTRIES EST.—2017. TRANSFORMING DEFENSE THROUGH ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY. USA. AUTONOMY FOR EVERY MISSION. CAUTION: FAST MOVING VEHICLE.”
Same design language Anduril runs on its drones, sensor towers, and autonomous platforms. The Anduril shield sits oversized in white outline on a black hood. Yellow accents on the #24, splitter, rocker, and rear hazard chevrons. Black, silver, and white everywhere else.
Most Cup paint schemes are billboards. Sponsor logos sized to read at 200 mph, color block to match the brand guide, repeat. The Anduril car is a different exercise. It treats the body of a NASCAR Next Gen Chevrolet the same way Anduril treats its hardware: as a surface for design language, not a canvas for logos.
“The paint scheme is part of a greater world-building initiative, similar to what we have done with our systems,” said Jen Bucci, who led the design at Anduril. She used the word kineticism.
The Jeff Gordon link is in the yellow. Bucci said the team leaned on Gordon nostalgia and remixed it, and the Hendrick team flagged the yellow #24 connection early. The yellow, tying back to NASCAR’s safety vocabulary on flagging and signage, was a separate decision. Two reasons the color earns its place, neither of which drives the base.
Bucci’s other reference points, in her words: tradecraft, the covert world, and old Italian rally cars from the 60s and 70s. None of those references shows up as a direct quotation on the car.
Jeff Miller, VP of marketing at Anduril, on the bigger play: “We picked NASCAR because it has an unapologetic tie to the military, and we want to support the real heroes.”
That’s the deal. Plain and clean.
The venue does most of the storytelling for them. The Anduril 250 marks the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Navy. It runs at Naval Base Coronado on the first NASCAR street course ever built inside an active military installation. The base is home to the Naval Special Warfare Command. The audience in the grandstands and watching at home includes a meaningful percentage of the defense community Anduril sells to.
This is the part of the play that operators outside the category continue to underrate. Anduril is not a consumer brand. They do not sell to NASCAR fans. They sell to the Department of Defense, allied governments, and military procurement officers. A Cup Series broadcast on Amazon Prime Video, with Senate Armed Services Committee staffers and DoD program managers watching from couches in Northern Virginia and San Diego, is a more efficient audience for Anduril than most defense trade publications. The paint scheme is a recruiting poster, a brand statement, and a reminder to procurement that Anduril owns the airspace around the Navy’s biggest birthday, all in one piece of hardware.
Anduril is the Official Defense Partner of NASCAR. The structure is a three-layer play BoS broke down last fall: series-level partnership, ownership of the Coronado weekend as title sponsor, and a primary scheme on Hendrick’s home car. Each layer reinforces the other. Pulling anyone out would weaken the rest. Putting all three on the table at once is why the activation reads as deliberate rather than opportunistic.
For Hendrick Motorsports, the fit is cleaner than most multi-year defense deals. Byron carries an Anduril scheme twice a year through 2028. The second appearance lands at Chicagoland on July 5, which makes the Independence Day weekend the second of two patriotic windows inside a single contract.
The Bucci-led design team also gave Hendrick something they rarely receive from a sponsor paying this much: a paint scheme with editorial restraint. The Anduril Industries wordmark appears at scale on the doors. The shield appears at scale on the hood and the rear quarter. Beyond that, the rest of the surface is given to the design system. No tagline scroll, no QR code, no website URL across the rear bumper. The brand trusts the audience to know who they are solely through the typography.
Whether the audience does will be the test. The Anduril 250 runs Sunday, June 21. Coverage on Amazon Prime Video. The work that brought the car to this point has been moving for months.