Obviously, the main point to make about this is that it drastically increases the prominence of Lucozade as sponsor of the team – and, as an energy drink company, this places them in direct competition with Red Bull. Traditionally, the two companies have tended to pitch at different areas of sport – Lucozade, and notably its offshoot brand Lucozade Sport, is much more closely associated with athletic sports, while Red Bull have the market cornered in high-speed, machinery-based events. In this instance, however, they seem to have decided to capitalise on their existing relationship (as already established partway through last season) with a team who now look like a much closer competitor for the Red Bull team than last year – so every win for McLaren over Red Bull can also be seen as a victory for Lucozade over their competitor.

I’d be interested to know, in fact, whether the initiative for this came from Lucozade themselves – and by how much they had to increase their investment to get it – or if it might even have been McLaren’s idea. There’s also the question of whether Vodafone – still very firmly the team’s title sponsors – were happy to give up the valuable rear wing space.

It’s also worth noting that this is possibly the first time since the banning of tobacco sponsorship that two major teams have had similar, competing brands so prominently on their cars – particularly when you roll in the fact that Monster energy drinks sponsor Mercedes (albeit in much less obvious fashion). In the years since the ban (well, not counting Ferrari’s invisible Marlboro sponsorship), we haven’t really had that – and although it’s a telecoms company that are still McLaren’s major sponsor, the increased prominence of Lucozade will surely attract attention. And if Red Bull continue to be beaten by it, as they have been so far this season… well, it could be a very prudent investment indeed.

The categories should be fairly self-explanatory, but just in case they’re not, I’ll explain them anyway:

Colours – Er, the choice of colours (and shades), obviously. Specifically, do they work well together? How well do they make the car stand out? Are they colours that look good on a car full stop?
Design – How well are those colours employed on the car? Do any lines fit well with the shape of thing?
Sponsors – Have they got enough? Are they stuck in the right places, and – more importantly – do they integrate well, or clash, with the paint job?
Originality – Has the team come up with something new and dazzling, or simply photocopied a popular 1980s car?

So with that thoroughly clear and unambiguous explanation out of the way… on with the liveries!

Total: 12/20

Total: 11/20

Total: 11/20

Total: 15/20

Total: 14/20

Total: 13/20

Total: 9/20

Total: 11/20

Total: 12/20

Total: 14/20

Total: 12/20

Total: 14/20

So there we have it – and it turns out that, despite being pretty much exactly the same design as last year, my favourite 2012 car is proven BY SCIENCE to be the Mercedes, with a score of 15 out of 20 – though honourable mentions go to Lotus, Caterham and Marussia. I also like what Force India have tried to do, but the execution doesn’t quite come off and I think they could have been braver and made it more predominantly orange.

All in all, it’s not as vintage a grid as 2010 was (though I doubt any grid will be for quite some time), but while most teams have stayed the same as last year (leaving us little to talk about), a couple have at least improved and none have really gone backwards. So overall that’s a win, I suppose.

Agree? Disagree? Shrug casually, not really caring either way? Share your thoughts in the comments!

   

Despite all this, though, it’s not that bad on the whole. I loved last year’s design at launch, but it grew old quite quickly, and ditching the “This Could Be You” nonsense was long overdue before the season had even ended, so it’s good that it hasn’t been carried over to this year. As it is, while it could do with more sponsors, it doesn’t do a bad job of looking smart without – and the one main sponsor they do have actually works surprisingly well, despite TATA’s blue ostensibly clashing with the colour scheme. The amount of white, though, means it’s successfully and cleanly separated – a lesson from which the more cluttered Sauber could surely take note.

It’s not a look that screams “This is a team that’s going places”, or even “This is a team that has a coherent visual identity”, but thankfully it’s also not a look that says “We couldn’t be bothered coming up with a new livery”, and for that I have to applaud them, given how utterly barren this year has been for entirely new paint jobs.

The less said about those uniforms, though, the better. Yeesh.

 

But what they have done, at least, is change it up a little bit – in the first revealed pic (left) it looks less different from last year’s, with only the altered nose pattern standing out, but in profile view (right) we can more clearly see that it now takes on a diagonal, striped pattern. It’s at least distinctive, even if it looks a little bit too much like Dennis the Menace’s jumper, and even though it’s a shame the red now looks as orangey as it does, as the darker-looking shade on the 2010 car seemed to suit it a lot better. It is, just about, an improvement on last year – even with those slightly odd, blocky, boxed race numbers on the sidepods and nose tip, and even with the fairly awkward Marussia logo on the engine cover. And like many current cars, it could do with some more sponsors on its profile, but that’s a general F1 malaise rather than being specific to this team.

Not fantastic, then, but not terrible either – and at least, unlike many around them, the team actually seem bothered about freshening up the livery each year…

The nose section hasn’t changed, and could still do with better distribution of white to break it up. But there’s no denying that changing the shape of the white airbox stripe, and adding in the red strip, is a vast improvement.

Thanks to Séamus for the heads-up in the comments to the earlier article!

Some of these are ideas that I’ve already thought for a while that the particular teams should run (longtime readers may even recognise some suggestions that I’ve made in earlier posts!) In other cases, for the sake of rounding out the article, I’ve stopped to think about what might or might not work. As you’ll see, some are fairly close to the teams’ 2012 designs – others, however, are drastically different. Wherever I can, I’ve stuck to the 2012 (or 2011, where not yet launched) sponsor configurations of the teams – but on occasion I’ve imagined theoretical new sponsors.

I’m no professional designer, so my efforts might not be the most startlingly imaginative – you’ll probably note some recurring design themes, even – and I’m aware that the images don’t exactly look photo-realistic. Nevertheless, this is my representation of what I’d like to see…

(Oh, and the designs are pasted onto a generic 2011-looking car template that I found, rather than a 2012 stepped-nose variant… but I think we can all agree they look better that way!)

Red Bull

This is one that’s been a bee in my bonnet for years – although I don’t think the current Red Bull livery is especially bad or ugly, I’m disappointed in the lack of variety in recent years, and I think it would be great if they had a blue and silver paint job, echoing the design of a can of the fizzy energy drink. They used it as their test livery following their purchase of the team in 2005, and while it was slightly lacking in vigour, with a few tweaks it could work. Obviously in a quite flat, Paint Shopped-picture as above, it looks grey rather than silver – but with an actual, shiny silver, I think it could be quite dramatic.

McLaren

You can accuse me of being too backwards-looking with some of these liveries if you like – but given that they have a primary sponsor whose main colour is red, and that the chrome livery has arguably outlived its freshness… come on, wouldn’t a slightly Marlboro McLaren-themed livery look pretty darned awesome?

Ferrari

Another retro job, but a Ferrari just doesn’t look like a Ferrari to me unless it’s got black and yellow on the front and rear wings. We can lose that daft Scuderia Ferrari DefinitelyNotMarlboro patch from the engine cover, too.

Mercedes

I really like the current Mercedes livery, so I see no major need for change aside from expanding the amount of turquoise on the sidepod so that the Petronas logo doesn’t “leak” out into the silver. It needs to look a bit more solid, rather than just feeling like it’s been washed loosely onto the car.

Lotus

Only two things I’d really change about the retro Lotus livery, as I already mentioned when discussing the launch of the 2012 version: I’d change the yellow Lotus badge on the airbox to be simple gold text (as seen on the rear wing), and I’d lose the red endplates. Looks a lot neater, no?

Force India

This isn’t an idea that would have occurred to me before Force India launched a more heavily orange car the other week – but if anything, I think they didn’t take it quite far enough. But we know how great predominantly orange cars can look, don’t we? Hence, this dramatic design – with orange as the main colour, but white sections allowing certain sponsors to integrate a bit better, and green reduced to an accent rather than a primary feature. I’m quite pleased with this one.

Sauber

Slightly on to a loser attempting to integrate the team’s current sponsors with their chosen white/black-or-grey/red colour scheme… I can almost sympathise with how badly the 2012 car has come out, in fact. In an ideal world, this would be Telmex blue, but I tried to play fair and stick to Peter Sauber’s desired colours. Still don’t think it’s great, but it’s a bit of an improvement, maybe?

Toro Rosso

Obviously, this only makes sense when viewed next to the “parent” team’s car – but yes, this is a “Sugar Free” variant. Well, why the hell not?

Williams

This is basically the car that made me want to do this article in the first place – I wanted to see if the classic Camel/Canon livery could be applied to Williams’ current set of sponsors. And hey! I think it works. What with PDVSA’s red taking the place of Canon, and Embratel going nicely on the yellow engine cover… this almost seems like too perfect a combination. You could argue that doing liveries that call back an incredibly successful era when Williams are going as badly as they are is a bad idea… but if they were going to keep doing it, this would seem a natural way to go. Oh well.

Caterham

I don’t have huge problems with Caterham’s 2012 livery, although I do think it’s odd that they carried over the 2011 colour scheme given their eagerness to change the (utterly perfect) 2010 design after one year. So basically, my ideal Caterham would be the 2010 Team Lotus paint job, but with 2012 sponsors. Simple.

HRT

Biggest “leap” out of all of the designs, this. I couldn’t really figure out what to do with HRT, given their lack of sponsors and apparent lack of identity. So I thought, what the hell – what if they suddenly tied up a big new sponsorship deal, with one of the biggest companies in Spain? This was nearly a Repsol car, but instead I’ve gone with Telefonica – but flipped the corporate colours from the way the 2000 Minardi (still can’t decide if I love or hate that car, incidentally) used them. Well, it’s something different, at least.

Marussia

I don’t see a problem with having two red teams on the grid – so long as the second one isn’t too close to Ferrari’s shade – and so that’s the predominant colour I’ve gone with for this Marussia design. And in the interests of variety, I went for right-angled lines on this one, rather than simply following the car’s contours. At the time of writing the team have yet to launch their first car as main owners of the team, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do stick with red/black/white – but if they were looking to shift more towards their own colours, I reckon they could do worse than this…

And it’s weird.

 

But still, something just doesn’t feel quite right about this. Keeping red as a third colour, in deference to PDVSA, is fine – and the subtle stripe on the engine cover is a nice touch. Indeed, the whole area from the sidepod to the rear wheels, at least below cockpit height, looks really good. There, the livery actually looks like it’s been designed to fit the lines of the car. But elsewhere? I’m not so sure. It’s the airbox that does it, I think – there doesn’t seem to be a reason why there’s a completely horizontal white stripe, separating one blue area from another. Surely the airbox would look better in white, as on last year’s car?

The odd distribution of patterns extends to the nose area – okay, I know there’s barely anything that can be done to make these horrendous stepped noses look good, but the white sections on and around the nose simply feel arbitrarily-placed. They don’t serve any sort of aesthetic purpose to the livery as a whole – the nose and monocoque certainly need some white, to balance the section above the sidepods, but what’s there doesn’t do the job, and simply makes the main monocoque area feel like there’s something missing. It’s a livery that, all in all, creates a weird disconnect in the brain, because it’s instinctively not right – it just feels broken, somehow. Not keen on those incredibly cheap-looking uniforms, either.

In fact, if the livery – particularly given the shade of blue – calls to mind anything, then rather than a previous classic Williams car, it’s this:

… and I somehow doubt it was the original intent. Although, you know, if Williams do intend to start using their cars to pay tribute to classic racers from other British teams besides themselves, can I put in a request for a J191 livery next year?

Let’s look at Red Bull first, then, since (a) they’re reigning champions and so deserve it, (b) they have the least in the way of changes to talk about and (c) they’ve been strangely shy about putting pictures of their car online:

 

Talk of red endplates gives us a nice segue into Lotus, about whom I had the vague hope that they might have dropped said similarly-coloured wings. But no – they’re still there, present and correct:

  

Other than that – and entirely sensibly – it’s largely the same as last year, with the only changes being reshuffling of sponsors. Lada are gone, their spot taken by a possibly slightly too large and obtrusive anti-dandruff shampoo ad. Fellow Unilever brand Rexona also make it to the engine cover. The team still don’t seem to have learned that a big yellow Lotus badge doesn’t look all that great on this livery – but they have at least improved its nose cone placement, extending the gold tip and setting the badge within it in quite smart fashion.

Generally, with less cluttering of sponsors than last year and – that badge aside – smarter placement, this is overall an improvement on what was already a pretty darned stonking livery to begin with. Not that they can claim credit for the idea of it, of course, but let’s move on from that now.

Finally, then, to Toro Rosso:

  

I mean, really. Having had the worst livery on the grid for two years, you’d assume Sauber could do nothing but improve. And to be fair to them… they have improved. Well, they’ve improved half the car, anyway.

  

But then you get to the nose. The nose that they’ve… just forgotten to paint, it seems.

Oh yeah, sure. They might claim that it’s a deliberate part of the livery. But if it were… then why isn’t there a red trim along the edge, as there is the black section at the back? Why, too, does it not actually appear to run parallel with its companion section? Why does it end at such an arbitrary place – further up the nose than one sensible option (on the contour of the stepped nose), but lower down it than the other (at the cockpit edge)? And why… well, just why, basically?

I’m actually starting to think they’re deliberately winding me up, now…

So, then. Something of an exercise in making some bits better, and making some bits much, much worse:

  

But the colours are only part of the story – and while the various United Breweries brands are integrated into the new colour scheme pretty effectively, there’s a big problem on the horizon thanks to the team’s new co-owner. And considering the fact that Sahara’s own logo is simply their name in black text with the Indian flag (i.e. the three colours that are already on the car) alongside it, it’s inexplicable just how badly they’ve put it on the car. It’s almost as if the Force India guys designed the car, and a rep from Sahara showed up with gigantic decals at the last minute. Whereas with entirely green (even sponsorless) sidepods, and the Sahara logo going on smaller in the white space below the driver’s head, this could have been a stone-cold classic.

It still doesn’t quite stop this being possibly the best looking car this team have had since back when they were still Jordan – but it’s not far off doing so. Shame. Will be interesting to see if there’s any improvement once the season draws on.