Proving Grounds Challenge #6: Hunt the Front World 100
We’re working with our friends at Hunt the Front to give an artist on Trading Paints their big break on one of the biggest stages in dirt-track racing.
With our latest Proving Grounds Challenge, you’ll take a simple prompt: paint a generic Dirt Late Model featuring Trading Paints and Hunt the Front logos. If the team likes yours the most, you’ll get hired to design the team’s actual wrap for the World 100 this fall.
How to participate
Post an iRacing Dirt Late Model paint to the Trading Paints Showroom between now and June 27, featuring generic Hunt the Front and Trading Paints branding — you’re not proposing what the actual World 100 car will look like, but rather showing off what you’ve got as a designer when there are virtually no restrictions.
Include #ProvingGrounds in the description of your entry to be included in the listings on the Proving Grounds page where the Hunt the Front crew will search for their designer.
If you want, feel free to tell your story in your paint’s description and what it would mean to you to get a shot to design the team’s actual car.
As long as you include the Hunt the Front and Trading Paints logos somewhere, how the car looks is totally up to you and how you think you can best capture the attention of the Hunt the Front team.
How the winner is selected
The Hunt the Front team will carefully review each Proving Grounds submission after June 27 and decide based on what they’ve seen which artist will get their big break to design the team’s wrap for the 56th World 100, one of the biggest dirt racing events of the year, taking place from September 10-12, 2026.
The winning artist will be hired by the team and will work directly with the HTF crew to design the car’s actual World 100 wrap, using the team’s real sponsors, colors, and other requirements. (Trading Paints is an associate sponsor!) You’ll get two tickets to the event, too, if you want to attend and see your work in person.
For the three entries earning the most favorites, you’ll receive some merch from Hunt the Front and Trading Paints.
This is not a design contest
You’ve no doubt seen how typical “design contests” usually go: artists are asked to do free work for a client with the slim chance they’ll win, dangling the hope of getting featured on a real-world car. Meanwhile, the client might get 100 options, while 99 designers end up with nothing to show for it. Not a great deal for artists!
That’s not what Proving Grounds is.
The prompt here is intentionally open-ended. Design a paint with minimal restrictions — not for a client, not proposing a design for an actual car, but as a showcase for your skills. If Hunt the Front likes what they see, you’ll get hired to design their actual World 100 wrap featuring the team’s real sponsors, colors, and specs, following the process professional designers take to translate a wrap onto a real race car. (And if you’re not selected, you didn’t just do free work that somebody else benefits from.)
Think of it as an audition as opposed to a contest.
A special opportunity
We know there are so many talented painters in the Trading Paints community looking for a shot at creating a real-world design, so we’re really excited that our friends at Hunt the Front are willing to work with an artist from the world of Trading Paints to show that sim painters have got what it takes.
Here’s your opportunity to prove it.
