Paul Oz Made an Ayrton Senna Sculpture out of Melted F1 Wheels

From the May/June issue of Car and Driver.Paul Oz’s teachers didn’t think he should pursue a career in art. “When I was 16, my grades were better in maths and physics than in art,” he says. “The advice was, ‘No, you don’t have a vocation for this.’ You need to do a proper job.” Chastened, a young Oz studied engineering and kept painting as a hobby. In 2008, when he was almost 30, he began showing his work. Shortly thereafter, his lively canvases celebrating Formula 1 cars and drivers caught the attention of F1 teams. In 2012, he began working in sculpture. Using traditional foundry techniques as well as 3-D scanning and printing technology, Oz creates realistic sculptures in bronze, such as Senna Eau Rouge, the statue of Ayrton Senna he debuted in 2019. Recently, Oz used magnesium sourced from the wheels of McLaren’s F1 cars to cast the magnesium Senna La Rascasse (above). Here’s how.Oz’s first sculptures used automotive components, but in 2018 he began work on Senna Eau Rouge, a bronze casting made using a traditional lost wax process, but with a very modern twist—that twist being the use of 3-D scanning to create the initial wax plug. Oz had learned of a photographic method to create 3-D scans by combining hundreds of 2-D images taken at different angles. He got a replica Senna suit, lost weight to fit in it, and spent several ab-burning minutes in the laid-back crunch of an F1 driving position. “When we did the 3-D capture for the first Senna, we had a bank of nine cameras, maybe 12 cameras moving around me to create the 3-D model. Then the software stitches the images together. I had to hold that position for three or four minutes and it was about 30 times over two days. It hurt a lot.” Later, as the technology progressed, Oz was able to capture an image in seconds, which is how he did later pieces for Lamborghini and Ferrari with live animals as the models. Back to the first Senna. After capturing the image, Oz had the digital model 3-D printed and re-created in clay where all the details were finalized. From there it was cast in wax, and a final mold was made to pour the bronze. One of the benefits of a digital model is the ability to change its scale for the printing. Oz made several copies in different sizes, and one now sits permanently in the McLaren headquarters in Woking, U.K. Following the success of the bronze version, Oz decided to try making one out of magnesium, and not just any magnesium: used wheels off the McLaren F1 cars. “Who would have thought that I could just email Zak Brown and say, ‘Hey, Zak, can you spare some wheels, because we think we can make a sculpture from them?’ And he just went, ‘Yeah, sure, how many do you need?'”Because all F1 parts have codes on them that track their data, Oz knows that his sculpture was made from wheels from McLaren’s ’22 and ’23 seasons, from cars driven by Danny Ricciardo, Lando Norris, and Oscar Piastri. “The most interesting one was a brand-new wheel that Oscar clipped the wall with in Monza qualifying in 2023, written off after a total of 23 km,” says Oz. “But another did 12 runs over nine different race weekends, 1030 km [640 miles]!”Once Oz had his wheels at the foundry, he needed to turn them into molten metal. Most of the process was the same as for bronze, only magnesium is a much more volatile material. Oz found out exactly how much more when a bad seal in the vacuum cabinet during casting led to a 3500-degree fire and two wheels’ worth of magnesium dribbling out on the foundry floor. “The whole place had to be evacuated,” says Oz. “And I had to ask Zak for more wheels.”Attempt number two went off without a hitch, and Oz was able to unveil the finished piece at the McLaren activation in the Four Seasons Las Vegas during the 2024 Grand Prix. Over his career, Oz has worked with most of the race teams in the paddock, casting a bull for Lamborghini and a rearing stallion for Ferrari, as well as sculptures of Emerson Fittipaldi and Michael Schumacher. His biggest commissioned project has been with McLaren, where he’s halfway through a series to celebrate its world champions. He’s done Bruce McLaren, Niki Lauda, James Hunt, and of course Senna, and is working on Lewis Hamilton. Next, he says, will be Mika Häkkinen. “He wants to be naked on a unicycle but I told him to be careful, because if Zak says yes, we’ll do the sculpture naked on a unicycle.”Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver’s license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story “A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2.”  In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story “In Washington, D.C.’s Secret Carpool Cabal, It’s a Daily Slug Fest” was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.
 
Source: caranddriver.com