Making blue clay
Ion Tiriac, a consultant to the tournament, has said that the cost of making a blue clay court is almost double that of making a red clay court. The process is essentially the same as producing a red clay court, with the dyed bricks ground into fragments. Two layers are then spread over the court.
On the official website: “It’s important to take into account that we can never directly dye the original red bricks blue as we would never achieve the desired colour as the base of the red brick off a different effect. For that reason, the iron oxide needs to be removed at the start of the process. Another interesting point is that if we put one hand in a bag of red clay and another in one containing blue clay we would see that the red clay would leave a stronger stain.”
