So it feels a bit odd trying to in any way judge the new Mercedes livery on aesthetic standards. Whether or not it looks any good – and particularly how it looks in relation to the original livery – is completely irrelevant when set against what it means. It’s a huge statement – sure, the kind of huge statement that’s ultimately meaningless unless it’s backed up by the kind of action Mercedes are saying they’re committing too – but a huge statement nevertheless. There will be (and indeed are) those arguing that F1 liveries shouldn’t be a place for politics – I would argue firstly that it’s rare that anything is truly apolitical (and F1, certainly, never is), and secondly that there are certain times when we cannot be callow about the idea of allowing people and organisations to make strong positive political statements, and this is absolutely one of those times.

So Mercedes coming out in support of Lewis Hamilton in particular and the BAME community in general by changing their silver – the only colour that a Mercedes works team has ever raced in – to black for an entire season is a big deal, and something to be applauded, and it doesn’t matter what the car looks like.

But also… the car looks amazing.

The original 2020 livery felt like it had one too many different designs and colours competing – with the Petronas turquoise, INEOS maroon and white star pattern all jostling for space against the silver canvas. Changing that canvas to black, while not actually changing anything else about the livery, solves that problem in a single stroke. All three colours (not to mention the silver trimming around the INEOS logo on the airbox) look great on black, and they look great together on black. It feels like it was always meant to look this way, and the black backdrop also means it’s possible to include other colour elements such as the #WeRaceAsOne rainbow branding on the wing mirrors.

It shouldn’t matter that this is now possibly the best-looking thing on the 2020 grid, competing even with the AlphaTauri. The fact that it is, though, is a bonus.

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Once the voting was closed, we totted up the points from over 300 vote submissions, but we also had to combine votes where the livery for multiple seasons was clearly essentially the same. The decisions over when to merge and when to keep separate, and where those lines should be drawn, were judgement calls on our part; you may disagree with some of our decisions, you may feel that certain liveries should have been split over multiple entries, or that we’ve made a split where there should be none. However, we made our decisions based partly on our own feelings about the livery, and partly to ensure that we had the most interesting and varied top 20 to write about.

Nevertheless, these decisions haven’t had a huge effect on the overall shape of the voting. Essentially, this is your decision. And so, without further ado, here are the F1 Colours Readers’ 20 Greatest Liveries of All Time…

20. Benetton (1986) – 348 points

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We start with a bit of a surprise, and the surprise is that this is the only Benetton car that made it into the list. Neither the garish block-coloured United Colours efforts, nor the 1990s Mild Seven livery, got enough points to crack the top 20 – but the car that does make it is from the team’s very first season in the sport.

It is, though, an absolutely fantastic livery, taking corporate green as a smart base and with the brilliant paint-flash scheme across the rear. In fact, we don’t know why they didn’t stick with it beyond 1986 – but it’s a hugely memorable one-off. Although when they painted the tyres, they did look like Fruit Polos.

19. BMW Sauber Petronas (2006-09) – 349 points

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When BMW took over the Sauber team in 2006, they carried over something quite similar to the blue and white livery they’d run with Williams in previous years – but with the emphasis more heavily on the white, and the introduction of a red accent colour that called to mind the BMW M Motorsport branding.

It was extremely smart, although we’d be tempted to dock points for the fact that they made basically no changes, beyond a bit of sponsor shuffling, across the four seasons they were in the sport. Worth noting, too, that this is the only time Petronas has ever appeared on an F1 car and not demanded a turquoise backing colour.

18. Lucky Strike / 555 BAR (1999) – 399 points

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Routinely held up as one of the worst liveries in F1 history, the debut car from British American Racing has nevertheless endured as something of a cult classic – and here it is as your eighteenth-placed greatest livery ever.

We can wonder about what could have been if the team had been allowed to run both cars – and in the years that followed, they’d make the sensible decision of just sticking to a Lucky Strike livery. But having come up with these designs, the chutzpah they showed in finding a way to run them both anyway does deserve applause, and two decades on we still haven’t seen anything like it in F1 since.

It’s also worth noting how even aside from the split, the two liveries themselves are unlike anything else that was around at the time. They’re light on sponsors, and one’s got wings while the other’s covered in stars. They’re weird. But they’re also two of the most memorable liveries in F1 history, cut-and-shut together into one.

17. MTV Simtek (1994-95) – 426 points

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A shorter-lived livery than anyone involved would have hoped for, as Simtek ultimately only competed in 20 races across 1994 and 1995. And, of course, this colour scheme was the one adorning Roland Ratzenberger’s car on that tragic weekend in 1994.

But it’s clearly a fondly-remembered livery for all that, perhaps because purple is so rarely seen on a car. It paired smartly with the black, and it was impressive enough that the lowly team had managed to get sponsorship from MTV at pretty much the peak of the channel’s brand prevalence.

The 1995 car was toned down by comparison, with additional sponsorship by way of the drivers they’d signed. It was a shame to see it disappear off the grid so quickly, and we’ve never had a predominantly purple car since.

16. Leyton House / March (1988-92) – 470 points

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The only livery in our list that technically appeared on two different teams’ cars is this distinctive and classic colour scheme from the turn of the 1990s. The team was still March when the mysterious Japanese company Leyton House came in as title sponsor in 1988, decking the car out in a distinctive shade of light blue.

But the livery really came alive in 1989, with the addition of green BP sponsorship. It became so indelibly associated with the team that Leyton House actually took over ownership and naming rights for 1990, but when they disappeared at the end of 1991, March ran their final season in the sport with a car that shared the original blue colour, but little else of the original livery’s exciting verve.

Something about the huge LEYTON HOUSE lettering has contributed to making this a design classic that still looks great on retro merchandise.

15. Benson & Hedges Jordan (1997) – 526 points

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The first time you’ll see a Jordan in this list – but not the last. Some of the yellow Benson & Hedges designs have been counted together in the voting, but the 1997 car – with its distinctive snake design – stands alone.

The switch to a bright yellow followed the failed experiments of 1996 with mustard and gold – and made an immediate impact, giving the Jordan team a playful identity that they exploited to huge commercial effect throughout the 1997 season. It’s perhaps best remembered now for the inventive “Bitten & Hisses” workaround for non-tobacco races – but even aside from that, it’s a bold and memorable design that uses its black and red secondary colours superbly.

14. Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro (1997-2006) – 609 points

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We had a bit of a job figuring out where to separate Ferraris in the list – and while you could make a case for simply lumping all the votes together, we drew a line from the introduction of Marlboro as title sponsor in 1997, to the switch to a darker red from 2007. As a result, with totalled votes, the “Schumacher era” car is the only one that made it into our list.

The lighter shade of red was controversial when it replaced the classic “rosso corsa”, but it came to be associated with the most successful period in Ferrari’s history – which is undoubtedly why it’s now remembered so fondly. In the early years it was a bit of a hodge-podge of logos on a plain red, but it gained something in 2002 when Vodafone arrived on the sidepod and the larger Marlboro chevron spread across the engine cover – turning into a sleek and stylish red and white design.

13. Scuderia Toro Rosso (2017-2019) – 695 points

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The most recent entry on our list, and easily the most popular livery of the last decade. Toro Rosso turned everyone’s heads when they unleashed this on to the grid in 2017, and it spent three happy seasons as the best-looking thing in F1 by a comfortable margin. A pure, three-colour design – blue, with red trim, and silver logos – that glittered and shined with every single part working in harmony with the others.

It didn’t even outstay its welcome, either – we were sorry to see it go at the end of 2019 while also applauding the team for not just resting on their laurels and wheeling it out for five or six years unchanged. And can we really complain when it was replaced by the 2020 AlphaTauri design?

(AlphaTauri, incidentally, made it to a remarkable 30th place in the voting despite not having turned a wheel in anger yet. Watch out for it if we ever do one of these again…)

12. Vodafone McLaren Mercedes (2007-13) – 779 points

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Speaking of cars that spent five or six years unchanged… the chrome McLaren was certainly a striking and bold new thing when it debuted in 2006, but it really took on its iconic look when it was combined with bright Vodafone red for 2007 onwards. Undoubtedly, a lot of the affection people have for this livery must lie in the fact that it was the one Lewis Hamilton made his debut – and then won his first title – in. But surely we can all agree that by the time of its last season in 2013, it was getting way past time for a change.

Nevertheless, considering it was the successor to not one, but two absolutely iconic McLaren liveries, it’s pretty impressive that this one managed to stand out as well as it did too.

11. Mild Seven Renault (2002-06) – 810 points

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While none of the Benettons that bore Mild Seven sponsorship made it into the top 20, here’s a storming result for the car that followed them. When Renault took over the team from 2002 onwards, the combination of their yellow with the two-tone blue initially felt like a bit of an awkward cut-and-shut.

But in the years that followed, the design was refined – gaining more swooping lines, a more modern Mild Seven logo, and an iconic presence that was no doubt helped by Fernando Alonso’s back-to-back world title wins.

Now, the less said about what Renault did with the car following the end of tobacco sponsorship in 2007, the better…

10. HSBC Jaguar (2000-04) – 894 points

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As soon as Jaguar took over the Stewart team, we knew the car was going to be green. We didn’t know quite how beautiful it would be, though. The 2000 launch car was an immediate home run, and wasn’t even compromised by the red and white HSBC sponsorship – in fact, they complemented it perfectly.

The same was true of the increased Beck’s logo on the barge boards and monocoque for 2001 and 2002 – in fact, it fits the car so well it’s easy to forget they just had a plain logotype in 2000. The effect of the livery was somewhat countered in 2003 when the blue logos of AT&T just didn’t work – but it got a welcome refresh in 2004 with a more swooping design, deeper green and simplified HSBC sidepod logo.

9. Canon Williams (1985-93) – 944 points

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Williams seemed to hit on this colour combination almost by accident – the white Canon sidepods, blue main body and yellow engine cover all seemed to grow together organically over the course of the 1980s, rather than being a specific identity that was set out at the start. Yet despite being an unlikely combination they did work well together, giving the team a distinct identity throughout its rise to the top of the sport.

The most iconic version is undoubtedly the one driven by Nigel Mansell in 1991 and 1992 – with new sponsor Camel fitting so perfectly in the yellow section it’s amazing that colour had been in place for six whole seasons before the sponsor came in. Of course, our favourite version is the 1993 vintage, with its additional Sega sponsorship…

8. Brawn GP (2009) – 963 points

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An absolutely remarkable performance in the poll for a livery that was a last-minute, thrown-together job, spent the whole season feeling like it was going to be replaced by a “real” livery, and kept having different main sponsor logos added on a race-by-race basis.

But when it comes to iconic single-season liveries, this one’s incredibly hard to beat. It’s partly because of the bolt-from-the-blue that was Jenson Button’s title win and the Brawn team’s remarkable performance. But it’s also because it’s a colour combination that we’d never seen before and have never seen since – almost entirely white, just with a trim of black and full-on highlighter yellow. And it may have been a quick job, but there’s good design here – from the nose stripes (which Mercedes actually kept for their first season after taking over) to whoever had the bright idea to paint the hubcap covers.

We didn’t break the livery down into individual versions for the voting, so we don’t know which particular version you liked best. For our money, it looked best at Singapore – with Virgin Media and Canon logos, but before the ugly orange-yellow front wings had come in.

7. West McLaren Mercedes (1997-2005) – 1144 points

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McLaren had one of the most famous liveries in F1 history for the entirety of the 1980s and a good chunk of the 1990s. Whatever they replaced it with, once the Marlboro deal concluded at the end of 1996, was going to have to be pretty special. And after a testing-based flirtation with papaya orange, “pretty special” turned out to be an understatement.

The change in colour scheme to silver was a statement of intent regarding the team’s engine linkup with Mercedes – and was the first livery of the modern era to call back to the classic “Silver Arrows” look. With a black trim and flashes of red, this was a striking new identity – but one that defined the team during their new era of success.

It’s another livery that slightly lost its impact as the cars changed shape from the chassis that it was originally designed for – but for those first three, Mika Hakkinen-led years, it was easily the best thing on a generally very good-looking grid.

6. Benson & Hedges Jordan (1998-99) – 1157 points

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It’s a first top ten entry for Jordan, whose “Buzzin Hornets” design makes it all the way up to sixth place by way of combining the votes for both the 1998 and 1999 versions. Yes, there were some changes between seasons – most notably the removal of colour sections from the airbox and nose – but fundamentally it was the same basic livery and colour scheme, and we’ve drawn a line after ’97 due to the switch from the snake, and before 2000 where the shade of yellow became much brighter.

Of the two, we slightly prefer the cleaner ’99 variant, particularly with its large race numbers on the nose – although the gold headrest stands out a bit jarringly. However, it’s the ’98 version that lives longest in the memory, particularly thanks to the team’s epic 1-2 victory at Spa. In fact, if the votes had been split, the ’98 car would have been the highest-ranking B&H livery, beating even the ’97 snake.

5. Orange Arrows (2000-02) – 1177 points

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Arrows had already had some pretty great liveries through the Tom Walkinshaw era, but they upped the bar hugely with a spectacularly good sponsorship deal in 2000. Signing up with telecoms giant Orange, they enabled the car to be called both the “Orange Arrows” and the “orange Arrows”, with a gorgeous orange-and-black livery that somehow managed to look great even though it was bedecked in various other apparently small-fry sponsor logos.

It never looked better than on that brilliantly neat-and-tidy 2000 car – for 2001, the proportions shifted a bit and the unwelcome addition of Red Bull’s colours to the engine cover threw things off a bit. And in 2002, the solid orange nose didn’t have the verve of the previous striped version. In the years that followed, before their merger with T-Mobile to become EE, it’s a surprise Orange never returned to the grid given the reception they got as a sponsor – but at least the colour finally made a comeback with McLaren.

4. Marlboro McLaren (1981-96) – 1422 points

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McLaren first had the logos and colour scheme of Marlboro on their car as far back as 1974 – but it was in 1981 that the cars first took on the livery that would become famous, with an all-over white car adorned with two large chevrons, one at the rear and one across the nose.

It would go through tweaks here and there in the years that followed – but effectively, they ran with the same livery for the next decade-and-a-half. And as a period that included the epic battles between Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, that meant the Marlboro livery became one of the most enduringly iconic in the history of the sport.

There’s no denying it looks better on some cars than others, although it’s hard to quantify just why. If it’s got Senna in it, it automatically looks brilliant – whether that’s the airbox-free turbo-era monster, or the taller but more compact ’93 car that wowed Donington. It began to look a little tired in its final few years – a bit too much blank white space in ’94, and by ’96 it looked more like a Penske IndyCar than a classic McLaren. By the time it was gone, it felt like it had had its time – although there are many who would dearly love to see something like it make a return nowadays…

3. Rothmans Williams (1994-97) – 1422 points

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Remarkably, the third and fourth entries in our list scored exactly the same number of points – despite such a wide range of votes logged. But we’ve tie-broken it by putting the Williams ahead, due to racking up its points from only four seasons’ worth of cars, rather than the sixteen the McLaren had.

It’s actually a surprise just how popular this one was with voters – it’s an iconic car, sure, but we would have expected it to be in the lower reaches of the top 20. Rothmans had a long pedigree in motorsport sponsorship, but their time in F1 was surprisingly brief, due to being replaced by the Winfield brand in 1998 – indeed, you could be forgiven for thinking this Williams had been around for much longer, such was the impact it had.

Although the car is now indelibly associated with tragedy, the livery looked at its best on the more rounded shape of the 1994 Williams. The swooping gold and red trim lines give so much life to a design that could otherwise just be quite plain and simple blue and white. The cars became a little cluttered with logos in the seasons that followed, but they were generally always in complementary colours, at least until the ’97 car, which perhaps tried to modernise things a bit too far but lost the “classic” feel.

2. John Player Special Lotus (1972-86) – 1551 points

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The liveries that score highly on our lists do so for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they’re enduring, sometimes they’re associated with iconic drivers or performances, sometimes they bring a fresh and exciting colour to the grid, sometimes they have an unusual sponsor.

With the JPS Lotus, though, the answer is simple: it’s just cool.

It’s black, for starters. Painting your car black is such an obvious winner we’re surprised there isn’t at least one all-over black car on the grid every season (look at the reaction when even a lowly team like Arrows did it in 1998). But it’s also easy to ruin a black car with too many clashing logos (hello Andrea Moda, hello mid-2000s Minardi). The second thing the JPS car did was to use gold as its secondary colour -and its only secondary colour.

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Okay, they compromised a bit by adding the Union Flag later on, and there were occasional supplier logos that stood out – but for the most part, Lotus got buy-in from all their other sponsors to deploy their logos in the same gold as the JPS branding. And this meant the car always had a consistent look – it always looked like a JPS Lotus, and nothing else. This even endured after the team briefly lost the sponsor in the early 1980s – and in fact, the car arguably looked even better in its 1980s incarnation than it had done in the early ‘70s (but maybe that’s once again our view of Ayrton Senna talking).

The principles that make the JPS livery so good should be easy to follow – and yet so many teams have tried and failed to do something that lives up to it. Maybe that innate class, that inherent sense of cool, is harder to capture than you’d expect.

1. 7-Up Jordan (1991) – 2028 points

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We thought this was probably going to win. Even we’re surprised by how much, though.

Bearing in mind that everything else in the top five did so by racking up votes across multiple seasons, the fact that the top spot is taken by a single-season wonder, and by such a huge margin, is remarkable.

But it’s testament to just how good this livery is – and, we feel, a fitting tribute to its genius of a designer, Ian Hutchinson, who sadly passed away earlier this year.

Sure, some of the reason why it gets looked upon so fondly is its place in history: it’s the car that Michael Schumacher made his debut in, and with which the Jordan team raised eyebrows by arriving in the sport with a bang. It’s also an extremely aesthetically pleasing car shape even without the livery – undoubtedly one of the high points of 1990s-style car design.

But those factors alone wouldn’t be enough to put it so far at the top of this list. It’s more that everything about it, from the top down, makes the right decision. First off, green is simply the best colour for a racing car, and this is a type of green that glistens and glimmers. It’s stopped from just looking plain, though, by the (presumably Ford-inspired) blue sidepods, separated with a well-judged sliver of white, and the lighter emerald flashes.

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And having based the livery around the green, white and red of 7-Up – a fantastic and iconic piece of logo design that also only appeared in F1 for this singular season – the team somehow managed to find an array of sponsors that complemented it. FujiFilm’s white and red and TicTac’s green and white look born to go on the car, and everything else is picked out in plain white decals to avoid clashing.

The only time it didn’t quite work is when parent brand Pepsi took over the airbox for the Japanese Grand Prix – it’s not that adding more blue would necessarily have ruined the look, but the shape of the box felt awkward and not in keeping with the flowing lines of the rest of the car.

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It’s hard to say exactly what the Jordan 191 does that countless other great-but-not-the-best liveries haven’t also; there are lots of great green F1 cars, lots that have iconic logos, lots that use complementary decal colours, lots that are associated with memorable seasons or individual performances. Maybe it’s that it does all those things together. Maybe it’s that we only got that one glorious season with it, so we never had a chance to get bored. Maybe its mythical and apparently unshakeable status as “the greatest livery ever” has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don’t know.

All we know is that it is the greatest livery ever. We think so. You think so. There have probably been countless words written on F1 Colours in the past thirteen years that loyal readers have furiously disagreed with – but on this, it seems, we’re all united.

The post F1’s Greatest Liveries appeared first on F1 Colours.

Yes, following the surprise and sudden termination of Williams’ title sponsorship deal with the mobile phone (and everything else) company, the team have decided not to simply remove the logos, but to completely change their livery – and so the striking “Colgate” design, which seemed to herald an exciting new visual era for Williams, will never run in a race.

In its place, is… well, it does look a bit more Williams, we’ll give it that.

It has to be said that if this had been the livery they’d revealed immediately after the end of the Martini deal, it would make sense – keeping the same basic colour scheme while shifting towards a more classically-Williams dark blue trim, with a lighter blue alongside it that calls to mind the excellent 2006 and 2007 liveries. But when it’s set against the dramatic explosion that was the original 2020 car, it can’t help but feel a bit disappointing.

For one thing, it’s just a bit too white – and especially when we’ve got Alfa Romeo, Haas and AlphaTauri all running significant amounts of that colour as well, it’s a shame they couldn’t have seen fit to use the colours more extensively. One thing we’ve noted is the change in the race number font – the original livery had a quite striking and bizarre font that included stacking the digits of George Russell’s #63 vertically. Now, though, they’ve got a much more restrained and clear typeface – a sign, perhaps, of pulling back from the excessive showiness of the original look?

But the colours do go well together, and it does feel less jarringly un-Williams-ish than either of the ROKiT liveries managed to. But with the only sponsorship now coming from Nicholas Latifi’s portfolio, and the dreaded omen of having to fill the rear wing with the team’s own name, you do have to wonder if this’ll be the last livery we ever see from this team as we know them.

The post Take Two for Williams appeared first on F1 Colours.

How, then, do the teams stack up against each other this year? Let’s find out…

Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team

Last year’s Mercedes was probably their best one yet, although it still felt slightly like something was missing. Red trim might have been it, but this slightly purple-ish, gradient shade brought in by the new sponsorship with INEOS doesn’t feel like it’s it. It does provide a nice counterpoint to the Petronas turquoise but perhaps they both need to have stronger presence on the car to really work together.

Score: 7/10 – Improved in some ways, but not quite clicking completely

Scuderia Ferrari Mission Winnow

Black as the trim colour for a Ferrari is enjoyable to see, although it would be even better if they went full-on black wings with it. The new number font is great although the way it sits on a non-matt patch of red feels weird. There’s a strong identity here with this matt colour shade overall, but as with the last few years the car is still let down by those messy sidepods.

Score: 7/10 – Solid if unspectacular yet again for the Mission Winnow identity

Aston Martin Red Bull Racing

Well, it’s… it’s basically exactly the same as last year. Yes, it looks good, but come on, guys – move something around, yeah? Maybe when the Aston deal ends after this year we’ll see it freshened up – they really ought to start taking cues from their smaller brother.

Score 6/10 – “It’s a nice-looking car, but one we’ve seen too many times by now”. As last year, so this.

McLaren F1 Team

After absolutely adoring last year’s, I still can’t work out if this year’s is an improvement or not – which probably suggests that it isn’t, although there are things that are better. I really like the way the blue and black are used together in stripes this time, but it does give it a slightly strange and elongated feel and it’s a shame to lose the striking pattern from the rear of the 2019 design. It’s also hard to tell whether the matt orange is better or worse than the standard style of last year – we’ll see that better on track, I guess. And I don’t love the race numbers. All in all, I guess it’s a bit of a step down, but it’s still a great-looking car.

Score: 9/10 – Still a great colour scheme, and with improved application of sponsors, but ever so slightly lacking the wow factor of last year

Renault DP World F1 Team

They kept us waiting and waiting for, it turned out, the addition of a new logo as title sponsor of the team – albeit one taking a less-than-prominent space, akin to AT&T’s late-2000s sponsorship of Williams. Otherwise, this is effectively just a tweaked version of what they’ve had for the last couple of years. It’s still an extremely good-looking car, although that blue logo on the sidepod throws things off a bit; but I’m still yearning for the day they properly add some white beyond just the logos.

Score: 8/10 – Can see why they don’t want to change this livery much, but freshness is always good and so this just loses a mark

Scuderia AlphaTauri Honda

The livery that got the world talking. Yes, at a glance it seems fairly straightforward, with a very dark blue and a not-quite-white that make you think of a 2000 Williams BMW. But the more you take this in, the more you realise that it’s a quite transformative livery – it does things we haven’t really seen before, whether that’s the standout Honda logo in an unconventional position on the sidepod, the way the AlphaTauri name and strapline are in a long banner form, or a logo that’s so huge it’s basically part of the paint job rather than a decal. The fact that one of the best liveries of modern times has been replaced with something almost as good is remarkable.

Score: 9/10 – It’s not quite perfect, but it’s exciting and fresh, and put liveries at the forefront of the F1 conversation, so how can we not love it?

BWT Racing Point F1 Team

Like AlphaTauri, Racing Point have done something here that feels like it’s designed to fit how F1 cars currently look, not just adhere to the existing norms of livery shape and sculpting. The side-on BWT logo would only work the way current-spec rear-ends are packaged, and some people have reacted with disgust, but I think it’s great. Just by virtue of not having all the blue on it it’s an improvement on the mess they had in 2019, but I think this is the most coherent and striking version of the pink livery the team have had yet.

Score: 8/10 – Feels like the livery they should have always had back when BWT first came in

Alfa Romeo Racing Orlen

The last vestiges of Sauber-ness are gradually being chipped away at, as the amount of blue on the car decreases further to just be thin stripes on the nose, bordered by much larger red ones. Extending the red down the nose (from the halo where it was added to last year) is a great improvement to the overall coherence of this livery, as is the addition of red Orlen logos – it no longer feels so much like a cut-and-shut from two completely different teams. Perhaps next year we might finally get something that completely takes on a single identity?

Score: 8/10 – Just about earns another point on top of last year, but let’s see it improve even more in 2021

Haas F1 Team

Well, it’s not Rich Energy. It’s also not particularly exciting, but it is probably the least dull white-red-grey-black combo the team have had since their arrival in the sport, so we have to give them that. It does feel like they could be doing more – maybe a brighter red that popped off the car more, maybe make the black more of a carbon or matt effect? – but at least it’s smart and not egregiously ugly.

Score: 6/10 – Mediocre, inoffensive… just fine, basically.

ROKiT Williams Racing

This one was a bolt from the blue, and an immediate improvement on last year. It doesn’t feel like it has the “personality” of a Williams, and if anything it looks like it’d be better suited to racing in the US or Formula E… but it’s hard to deny that it’s a cool looking car that pops off the track and demands attention. The sponsors are integrated much better than last year, and the wispy blue fade effect is gone, too. Oddly they’ve got much worse driver suits than their excellent ones from last year, but otherwise, this is fun.

Score: 8/10 – Always nice to have an unexpected bit of excitement, though it’d be even better if it was more all-over blue and red than the dominant white

So that’s the 2020 grid. The big difference from 2019 is that we’ve lost a metallic blue car and a black one, and both have been replaced with cars with heavy amounts of white. Add that to the white front-ends that Alfa Romeo and Williams are carrying over from last year and, well, we’re not exactly at the late 2000s kind of level yet (2008 and 2009, in particular, were quite drossy), but let’s hope it doesn’t continue too heavily as a trend.

Despite another strong showing from McLaren, a nice surprise from Williams, and a good effort from Racing Point, the clear winner has to be the AlphaTauri. It doesn’t challenge the 2017 Toro Rosso or the 2019 McLaren to be the very best of the last few years, but it’s certainly up there. It’s yet another example of how great a car can look when everything works in harmony around a single design philosophy – and if Italy’s smaller team can get all their sponsors to agree to fit in with a colour scheme, it’s remarkable that Ferrari can’t follow suit. It’s disappointment, meanwhile, that Red Bull and Renault have stuck so rigidly to liveries that yes, are good-looking – but come on, we just like to see something new each time! And Mercedes continue their run of not quite getting it right, not that they’ll especially care what people think of the livery when the car inevitably runs at the front all the time again…

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Hutchinson was most famous for his work with the Jordan team, where he was employed between the team’s inception in 1991, and the first year of their contract with Benson & Hedges in 1996. This means, of course, that he was responsible for the livery that many – myself included – consider to be the greatest in the history of the sport, the 1991 7-Up Jordan 191:

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A beautiful early draft of the iconic Jordan 191 livery by Ian Hutchinson of Hutchinson Motorsport Design from the @Motor_Sport archives. pic.twitter.com/6YqHQSDq8n

— Jordan 192 (@F1_Jordan_192) October 18, 2017

Following the departure of 7-Up, Hutchinson was tasked with creating a new identity for the team via their sponsorship deal with Sasol, and did a remarkable job of giving them another fresh and striking look:

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In subsequent years Hutchinson and his team had their work cut out balancing this original look with the demands of a wide range of different sponsorship arrangements as Jordan carried out the financial footwork necessary to stay afloat; before the arrival of Benson & Hedges in 1996 gave them a brand new look. Initially, the cars rolled out in a mustard yellow colour scheme:

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… before Hutchinson, after the opportunity to review how the cars looked on television, was able to come up with a memorable and popular gold paint job:

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It wasn’t just at Jordan that Hutchinson made his mark, however. He was pretty much the go-to guy for good car design in the early 1990s (an era that, as anyone who follows the site will know, is just about my favourite for liveries), as this excellent roll of honour posted by the @F1_Jordan_192 Twitter account shows.

Particularly notable in this period were the 1994 Mild Seven Benetton:

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Along with bright new colour schemes for teams including Moneytron Onyx in 1989:

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AGS in 1991:

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And Brabham in 1992:

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In more recent years, he worked on another F1 Colours favourite, the 2010 Virgin:

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One of his most famous works of all, meanwhile, came outside of F1, with the late 1980s, how-did-we-never-see-this-in-F1 Silk Cut Jaguar Le Mans livery:

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As you can see, Ian’s contributions to the world of graphic design in Formula One, and motorsport in general, are perhaps more significant than any other individual. He’s responsible for styles and trends that echoed through the decades following his arrival in the sport, and can be said to have genuinely changed the face of it. In this article from 1992, Ian states his hope that the short-lived 7-Up livery would “go down as one of the Gold Leaf Lotus type of liveries”. I think anyone reading this site would agree that it achieved that, and then some.

Our thoughts go out to Ian’s family and friends at this time, and we thank him for his immeasurable contribution to this subject that we love so much.

Ian Hutchinson, 1960-2020

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It’s only taken us five years, but we’ve finally produced another video feature!

Every car and driver in Formula 1 carries a different race number – but are certain numbers more successful than others? We’ve done the maths to bring you a list of the 10 most successful numbers, based on race wins since 1974 (the year that numbers became fixed for a whole season).

Does Lewis Hamilton’s #44 beat Sebastian Vettel’s #5? What impact do the likes of Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell have on the figures? Watch on to find out.

The post VIDEO: F1’s Most Successful Race Numbers appeared first on F1 Colours.

It’s meant that the awkward fudged blue sections that got added to the car last year are gone, and as a result what we’ve ended up with is the cleanest execution of the pink BWT concept so far. Along the nose up to the cockpit it’s particularly smart, without any of the choppy sections or mixed-up colours that it’s had in previous years.

It’s when you get onto the sidepods and engine cover that things get interesting, with an enormous diagonal BWT logo that spreads right across both areas. This has proven controversial to some onlookers, but I like it – what’s particularly neat is that the tighter shape of current-era F1 cars means that this kind of livery is possible, whereas in previous generations there would have been a flatter top to the sidepod which would have meant that a design that worked in the side-on view couldn’t also work from top down.

The team themselves haven’t commented on the departure of SportPesa, but it’s interesting to note that over in football, both Everton FC and the Irish FA have ended their arrangements with the betting firm in the last week or so. Are these actions all linked, or coincidental? We’re unlikely to find out directly from any of the parties involved, but considering the impact of the team’s initial rebranding with them, it does seem strange for the partnership to have suddenly come to an end. But BWT have given the team such a strong identity over the last few years that it’s unsurprising to see the water technology firm step up and increase their presence.

The post Pointing Back to Pink appeared first on F1 Colours.

So it does feel rather like they’re making a statement with their 2020 livery – that after an annus horribilis on the track in 2019 with a livery that many felt was flat and unimaginative, they’re looking to make a real impact this year. As their own hashtag puts it: #WeAreFighting.

The new livery can be seen as an evolution of last year’s rather than a total reinvention of it – it’s still got the same shade of blue, alongside white and black. But the big addition is red, courtesy of ROKiT – our suspicion last year that they came along too late to have an effect on the livery looking like turning out to be correct – giving the team a colour scheme that they haven’t had since the 1999 Winfield car.

Despite the departure of sponsors including Orlen and Rexona, the car pleasingly doesn’t look bare – with the engine cover bearing the names of Lavazza (courtesy of Nicholas Latifi) and ABK Beer (actually another part of the growing ROKiT portfolio). There’s also a striking new number font, although I’m not incredibly keen on the way George Russell’s 63 is almost stacked one above the other.

Aside from the fact that there’s a growing amount of white on the grid again, I do like this – it’s a vast improvement on 2019, although it could be argued that it still doesn’t feel very “Williamsy”. But maybe that’s the point. It’s bold and brash, not characteristics that you’d really associate with Frank Williams, but maybe that’s just the kind of statement they’re intending to make.

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My initial reaction from the first shots I saw of the launch was how weird I thought the massive logo and “ALPHA TAURI” text on the engine cover were – and I still think that. But it’s weird in a good way. It’s unusual, and striking, and while it’s not a kind of layout we often see on an F1 car, it is one that actually fits the design and shape of this car really well.

The colour scheme, meanwhile, is one that’s close to not working – because it’s dangerously close to just being a simple black and white. That would make it very smart, sure, but also a bit dull – especially in a season where Haas already have a similar colour scheme. But it’s not just a simple black and white: instead it’s an extremely choice shade of very dark blue, coupled with something that’s not quite white, not quite silver, not quite grey, but somewhere on that spectrum.

And crucially, the whole car sticks to those two colours – with one exception (more of that shortly), every logo on the car is in the main colour scheme, just as it was on the blue and silver Toro Rosso livery that preceded this one. Doing this can make such a big difference to a livery, and is crucial if you’re going to take a simple colour scheme – like this dark blue and not-quite-white, or like the black and white of a 1998 Arrows – and make it sharp and striking. As for that one exception, meanwhile – it’s the Honda logo, unusually placed low on the sidepod, and picked out in a bright red. It’s another move that feels like it shouldn’t work, yet somehow does.

My favourite view of the car, though, is from the top down. That’s where we get a good look not only at that nice and smart race number font (something of a trend this season so far, that), but at the “panel” design on the nose. That’s a style that we don’t really see so much on F1 cars these days, but puts me in mind of how they looked in the 1990s – so naturally, it’s a style I’m in favour of.

All in all, considering the previous liveries it had to live up to, this is a remarkably good job. It’s striking and effective, and everyone’s talking about it. It’s going to look great on track, and it’s absolutely had the desired effect of drawing attention to the first clothing brand to name an F1 team since Benetton shuffled out of the sport in the early 2000s. And frankly, it makes us think even more that the parent team really ought to buck their ideas up.

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Aside from the change to that papaya orange, there are a number of ways in which the 2020 livery differs from last year’s, while still feeling very much like a new version of the same concept. The way that the blue sections have been applied to the car have changed significantly – we’ve now got blue sidepods and a blue section across the top of the entire airbox, in a change from last year where the blue was brought in only at the rear of the car and on the wings. As a result, the hexagonal motif that broke up the two colour sections has been dropped – instead, there’s a new black trim separating blue from orange, applied with a horizontal-dashed pattern. And, in an extremely pleasing development, the halo has changed from black to orange!

From a sponsorship point of view, the number of logos on the car has increased again – it still feels slightly like the team needs a proper title sponsor, but set against some of the other cars on the grid, they’re actually doing alright, and it’s a far cry from how the bare car looked in 2018. Most notably, the logos of A Better Tomorrow – a campaign run by former team owners British American Tobacco – are now prominent on the sidepod, although intriguingly there are versions of the studio shots released that don’t feature them at all, such as the below which featured on the official F1 site:

Are we going to hit another Mission Winnow-esque row over the use of a tobacco company advertising something that isn’t technically a tobacco product?

There’s a new style of number font featured on the car, too, although it looks much better in its striking white on the fin than it does on the nose, where it’s possibly not quite legible enough – maybe a switch back to the blue they appeared in last season would improve things there. The front view also shows a major new sponsorship addition on the rear wing in the shape of DarkTrace, who are apparently “a world-leading cyber AI company and the creator of Autonomous Response”. So there you go.

Is it better than the 2019 livery, though, is the question? At the moment, the jury’s out: the blue sidepods are fantastic, but does putting that much blue on (along with the black) move the concept too much back away from the McLaren papaya concept? And most importantly, how will the matte paint actually look on track? The shiny colour last year was actually a big part of that livery’s appeal – they’d finally got it right after a couple of years of not quite hitting the perfect shade. The new version definitely looks good in photos, but we’ll have to wait for testing to begin to see whether this is another 10/10 livery, or if we knock a point off for tweaking it maybe a bit too much…

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