ING had already stated that their deal with the team wouldn’t be renewed at the end of 2009, so we would have been expecting a new Renault livery for 2010 anyway. Should the team remain in the sport (and I’m not sure that’s a given), there’s hopefully a good chance of a classic yellow/black/white colour scheme next year. But the pertinent question now, is – what about the rest of ’09? With the announcement having taken place so close to the Singapore GP, there’s been no time for any major change to take place – the Renault logo has simply taken ING’s place on the car – but for the remaining three races, I wonder if the team will move to make any further changes? You have to say that the prospect of seeing that car with the orange removed, but with the yellow, red and white still in place, could make for a vast improvement…

Brawn GP will soon have a proper livery. All I’m saying is Monaco could be considered a high profile location to launch a major new sponsorship deal. White, red and green. I’ll say no more. Spread the word.

Make of it what you will!

… and there’s not really a huge amount to say about it, is there? The fluorescent stuff is alright, and gives the team a distinct identity, but it looks like nothing other than a test car. The arrival of Virgin gave hope that there’d be some kind of rebranding exercise… but thanks to Button’s win, that car is the most famous thing in motorsport, and I honestly can’t imagine them changing it dramatically between now and the end of the season – I know they’ve only had a week since Australia, but if it was going to change, it would have been for Malaysia, and it hasn’t. If, as expected, Richard Branson ends up buying out the team and renaming it, then maybe then – but that can’t happen until the end of the season anyway. So it really does look like we’ll be stuck with a plain white car – with just a couple of sponsor decals and a bit of fluorescent yellow – heading the field this season. Nice helmet redesigns, though.

At least Toro Rosso have made some changes this year. The painted Bull remains, but it’s shifted solely to the engine cover, and there’s now a large Red Bull text logo on the sidepod. Unfortunately, coupled with the Red Bull Cola advert on the rear wing, it has the effect of making the STR look even more like the RBR than it did previously. That said, it’s arguably a slightly nicer looking car than its big brother – and the text against a darker blue background puts me in mind of a mid-90s Sauber, from before they took on the turquoise Petronas branding.

So that’s our full grid of cars. Winners for 2009? Williams, I reckon. It’s not that different to previous years, but it’s a very smart car, and I really like the curved and swooping lines as seen in the side-on view. Losers? It’s got to be Renault – the grid’s ugliest machine sits under its ugliest livery, and while it looks like far less of a patchwork than the 07/08 cars (in that all the colours on it look a bit more like they’re meant to go together) it’s still mildly vomit-inducing. And the nose is appalling.

Everything as you’d expect, here – a tweaking of the usual blue livery with the red/blue/silver corporate lines. Note the rear wing, though, being used to advertise Red Bull Cola. It’d be quite nice if one of the two teams (if not the main one, then perhaps Toro Rosso) decided to deck their whole car out in that red/white/blue colour scheme for a bit of variety, don’t you think?

Elsewhere, Force India have clawed back some respect from this website after their shocking McLaren copy-job last year, by going for something a bit more distinctive :

Alright, so there’s still too much white – but in the absence of Honda (of whom more later) and Super Aguri, that’s not quite such a bad thing. I like that they’ve gone for a scheme that’s more in keeping with their team’s name and theme, making it clearly and immediately identifiable. Although it does look rather “cheaper” than last season – you can’t help but feel it has more of the look of a sponsorless, financially-struggling back-of-the-grid outfit. Oh, incidentally, confession time – images of this livery leaked a while back thanks to FI’s official 2009 calendar, which a reader kindly emailed me, and I COMPLETELY FAILED to get round to covering it, despite it being exactly the kind of scoop the blog was set up for!

So too, in fact, were those leaked pictures of the Williams livery that were around a short while back. Once again, the Grove outfit have eschewed an official launch, but have been running on-track at Jerez in what would seem to be their definite ’09 colour scheme. It’s pretty much as you’d expect – the usual blue and white of recent years, with the sponsors shuffled round a little :

As ever, I like it. It’s perhaps a bit simple (like almost every team, it’s low on sponsors – not inherently a bad thing, of course, but it does leave the car looking a bit un-dynamic), but I like the shade of blue (I can’t tell if they’ve changed it this year, though – on-track it looks the same, but in those promo pictures it’s rather lighter) and the shifted swooping lines are neat. Gawd knows what’ s going on with those shark-fin things, though.

And finally, although there’s not been a launch, and there are no pictures or anything to share, I’ve heard murmurings that the soon-to-be-renamed former Honda team, possibly to be known as Brawn Racing, could be running a light-blue and white livery this year. Which would make for a nice bit of variety, I’m sure you’ll agree. Hopefully we’ll find out if/when they show up for testing, but if it does turn out to be correct, remember that you heard it here first. Unless you didn’t.

We start with Ferrari, first out of the blocks (as they were last year) and, of course, sticking with almost exactly the same livery (as they did last year). Ferrari only ever change things when they’ve got a new major sponsor – or if it’s an end-of-era type situation, as they did when making the design a bit more “futuristic” for the post-Schumacher era.

They’ve gone with the same wider version of the “barcode” Marlboro fudging as was seen on the car for some of last season – it’s nowhere near as nice as the simpler version from 2007 and last year’s launch, to be honest. The sooner this weird, rule-bending half-association with Marlboro is over, and they have to actually put some thought into the liveries again, the better – sure, the cars always look nice, but they’re desperately unimaginative.

Speaking of desperately unimaginative… hey, it’s Toyota!

I don’t think there’s ever been a team with such a bloody-minded determination NEVER TO CHANGE. Alright, so as we discussed at the time of the ’08 launch, they make minor changes each year, but essentially, it’s been THE SAME BASTARD CAR since 2002. And it’s BORING. Even moreso when you consider that, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, we have too many predominantly white cars nowadays. For the record, this has been changed from last year (you wouldn’t know at a glance, but compare side by side and you get an idea), in that the red bits are back to being asymmetrical. But all that does is make it look like an older version, rather than something new. Sigh.

McLaren, meanwhile, haven’t got bored of the chrome look yet, and so are yet another team that are running a car almost identical to the last couple of years.

There are a couple of points worth noting on this one, though. If we compare it to last year, it can be seen that the red/black lines that run alongside the nose no longer stretch past the cockpit. This is probably, along with the way the red on the sidepod seems to run for further, a consequence of the new shape of the car. Meanwhile, it could just be a trick of the light, but the red looks a bit brighter, and a bit less orange. To be honest, though, these things are difficult to judge at launch, and there would seem to be no practical reason to simply change the shade, so I doubt it’s really any different. And the other point to note is that, clearly proud of Lewis’ World Champion status, they’ve stuck his race number #1 on the rear wing’s endplate. It’s particularly interesting when you consider that they didn’t bother to do the same with Alonso’s 2007 car – clearly, the team feel differently about champions that actually won in their own machinery…

And finally, we have BMW. Once again, not a huge amount to say, with a basic paint scheme that only alters to fit the simpler lines of these ugly new machines :

… but there are at least changes to note, and they’re quite obvious. The end of the sponsorship deal with Credit Suisse has left a gap on the car, with Intel moving to the rear wing endplate space (have they scaled back their involvement, too? They’re not on the front wing any more, either) It remains to be seen if the gap on the engine cover is going to be filled by a new sponsor before the season starts, but it’s interesting that BMW have chosen to put the old “BMW Power” text on the lower part – it’s somewhat reminiscent of their branding on the old Williamses. Oh, and Nick Heidfeld has a new, green helmet design – but I’ll be looking at all helmet designs once the season gets underway!

It’s a shame, really. I launched this blog to commentate on liveries, and over the last couple of seasons there’s been very little to talk about in the way of new designs (even less now that the number of teams in the sport is shrinking). Still, I’m hoping to keep things going (and I do mean it, this time!) with some more “history”-based articles, so hopefully that’ll see us through a barren year of paint-job-related excitement!

(pics from gpupdate.net)

Well, I suppose the best you can say is that at least they’ve bothered to change the livery.

Actually, let’s be fair. The main problem with the 07-08 Renault livery – although, I’ll admit, it did eventually grow on me a bit by simple virtue of hanging around for so long – was that it was a combination of colours that didn’t make sense. Yellow, orange and white – fine. But throwing in the dark blue just made it all off-kilter. They should have either dropped the orange or the yellow. Well, for 2009… they’ve dropped the dark blue, and replaced it with red, courtesy of new sponsor Total (who you may recall as a long-time Jordan sponsor in the mid- to late-90s).

Now, on paper, the combination of red, orange, yellow and white doesn’t sound too bad. I still don’t agree with an F1 car having four “main” colours (three should be the maximum), but at least they could be said to complement one-another. No, the problem here is in the application of the colours. Over the monocoque, it’s not bad at all – taking away the blue means it still wants for a defining colour, but there’s no clash and everything blends quite nicely. The two main problems I have, though, are in the use of the red, and with the engine cover.

The red, first, is clearly a mistake. Yes, the endplates immediately mark out the car as looking different to last year – and in a climate where we’ve only got nine definite teams, and at least half of those are expected to run near-identical designs, that’s something for a livery buff to cling onto. The problem is that they’re the only use of red on the car, and so they stand out absolutely horribly. Even moreso than the blue parts on the old car, they simply look like Renault have run out of wingplates and nicked them from another garage (a Jordan garage circa 1997, perhaps). They also ruin the effect of the new, yellow rear wing – something which would otherwise be quite nice and traditional in a “classic Renault” kind of way.

The  engine cover, meanwhile, is a bit of a mess. Orange and yellow stripes? Really? What are they there for? They seem completely at odds with the theme in the car’s front half of using the orange to separate the yellow from the white – here, orange is just liberally strewn wherever. The reddish nature of the orange means that from a distance, it looks like the team are being nice and patriotic for Fernando, but I can’t imagine that Nelsinho is hugely happy with that…

And then, finally, there’s the nose. Now this is bizarre. Quite aside from the ugly shape of it (and I don’t know what’s going on with these new regs, but all the teams seem to have taken them as a cue to make their nose cones hideously ugly in completely different ways), the weird thing is the way there’s a quite good, simple white-to-orange-to-yellow pattern running down the top half… and then suddenly on the nose itself, for no apparent reason, you’ve got a sudden cut to white, as if they suddenly ran out of paint, or something. Honestly, I bet you we see that altered and flashed with orange before the first couple of races are out. It’s just sloppy-looking.

Overall, while I was pleasantly surprised to see the Renault livery change in quite significant ways – particularly as it no longer looks like the Mild Seven car with the blue bits tipp-exed out – it’s clear that they’ve still got no idea what they’re doing. The new regulations means that F1 cars are all going to be naturally ugly this year – and it’s the job of the livery designers to counteract that with simple, effective designs. The time for swooping, dramatic layouts that follow the lines of the car is gone – because there are no nice lines on the cars any more. It’s why the Ferrari will probably turn out to be the only half-decent one – one colour, trimmed with another. Not FOUR, all vying for attention.

Come on, Renault. Ditch ING. Back to yellow, black and white. You know it makes sense.