Anyway! Lamenting aside, let’s have a look at how all the cars from 2013 stack up alongside one-another, using the patented F1 Colours scoring system developed last year, as follows:

Colours: Have the team just stuck a few pins in a Pantone chart, or have they actually picked hues that look good on a car and complement each other?
Design: Racing car livery, or spray-painted nightmare?
Sponsors: Not just whether there are any (although there bloody should be at least a few), but also whether they’re integrated into the colour scheme or not.
Originality: Ferrari need not apply.

Thoroughly splendid vector images of the cars from from Pieczaro, by the way.

Infiniti Red Bull Racing

Colours: 2/5
Good blue, good red, good yellow, good GRIEF WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THAT PURPLE?
Design: 2/5
Paint application (c) “El Barto”
Sponsors: 3/5
A simple and effective batch. Interesting that the words “Red Bull” don’t appear at all in profile view, now.
Originality: 3/5
A point up on last year for at least doing something a bit new, but even so…

Total: 10/20 (last year: 12)

Scuderia Ferrari

Colours: 5/5
Last year, I said it was “only missing a dose of black”. Well, hello. And I’m sure that’s a much closer approximation of rosso corsa than previous years.
Design: 4/5
It’d be even better without the white separating the black from red, but this is definitely up on last year. Italian flag stripe on the nose a great touch, too.
Sponsors: 2/5
Badly-placed UPS logo and that godawful fake Marlboro thing ruin an otherwise good portfolio.
Originality: 2/5
One up on last year for actually being a little bit different.

Total: 13/20 (last year: 11)

Vodafone McLaren Mercedes

Colours: 3/5
Apologies, I couldn’t find a picture of
Design: 3/5
the 2013 McLaren, so I had to use this
Sponsors: 3/5
one of the 2012 car with a new race
Originality: 1/5
number stuck on it instead. Sorry about that.

Total: 10/20 (last year: 11)

Lotus F1 Team

Colours: 3/5
It’s not just me, is it? The gold is less, well, gold than last year, isn’t it?
Design: 2/5
Over-application of the lipstick really not a good look at all. Takes astonishing effort to ruin a classic, but somehow…
Sponsors: 4/5
The clashing yellow Lotus logo has gone, but it’s overcrowded placement of others that now stops this being spot on.
Originality: 2/5
I guess it has to have a point more than last year for changing things up, but… come on…

Total: 11/20 (last year: 14)

Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team

Colours: 5/5
Great shade of silver, great shade of turquoise. As I said last year, they have no right working together, but they do.
Design: 4/5
Knocking a point off last year’s score for the unnecessary spray-painted sliver on the nose.
Sponsors: 3/5
BlackBerry a good addition to the portfolio. Still wish that Petronas logo looked a bit better, though.
Originality: 2/5
Barely changed since 2011.

Total: 14/20 (last year: 15)

Sauber F1 Team

Colours: 3/5
I’d rather it be closer to full-on black, but this is a pretty cool combo.
Design: 3/5
Stylish lines. A bit plain on the nose and rear, but pretty inoffensive.
Sponsors: 3/5
Another area improved, in as far as integration into the livery. Feels wanting for a single major sponsor, however.
Originality: 4/5
It’s new! Okay, it’s not a total revolution, rather a vast improvement of the existing idea, but: it’s new!

Total: 13/20 (last year: 9)

Sahara Force India F1 Team

Colours: 4/5
Still a great combo. Love orange on an F1 car.
Design: 3/5
As pleasant-yet-slightly-dated as it was a year ago.
Sponsors: 2/5
Blue logo on the airbox is a misstep. Also, despite having lots of names, are any of them not Mallya-owned brands?
Originality: 2/5
Exactly the same as last year – but at least it’s very distinctive to them.

Total: 11/20 (last year: 13)

Williams F1 Team

Colours: 4/5
Can’t go wrong with a nice dark racing blue and white, with red hints. Simple and classic.
Design: 2/5
This design seems to get flatter and duller with each successive year’s tweaking, sadly.
Sponsors: 2/5
Depressingly few. Where would they be without Maldonado? All look good on the car, mind.
Originality: 2/5
Diminishing returns, really. Would have appreciated more tweaks to last year than the swapping of the Renault/PDVSA engine cover strips.

Total: 10/20 (last year: 12)

Scuderia Toro Rosso

Colours: 4/5
Love that shade of blue, like that shade of gold, less keen on the pinky-red.
Design: 4/5
A lot of the extraneous nonsense is gone, and for the better. As with last year, though, more gold at the rear and/or more red at the front would balance it better.
Sponsors: 3/5
Only a handful of names, but prominently-displayed and well integrated.
Originality: 2/5
Looks exactly as you’d expect a Toro Rosso to look.

Total: 13/20 (last year: 11)

Caterham F1 Team

Colours: 5/5
Point lost for the slightly lighter green. Point regained for the excellent retro dark grey wings.
Design: 4/5
Only oddity is the lack of yellow in the front view compared with the profile: it should be either in both, or neither. Again, though, the wings save it.
Sponsors: 3/5
Definite improvement on last year, and all colour integration spot on, but the placement of a few of them is a bit odd.
Originality: 3/5
The same basic template of the last two years gets a slight freshening thanks to – you guessed it – those wings, plus a new kind of nose stripe.

Total: 15/20 (last year: 14)

Marussia F1 Team

Colours: 3/5
Seriously, get a better shade of red, guys.
Design: 2/5
Bland and F3000-ish. A disappointment compared with previous efforts. Dangerously close to Midland territory.
Sponsors: 2/5
What sponsors?
Originality: 3/5
Would still prefer Marussia to move away from the Virgin Racing colour scheme, but at least they do make effort to change the design year-on-year.

Total: 10/20 (last year: 14)

So, despite taking victory last year, Mercedes’ unwillingness to change things up much has led to them being overtaken by Caterham, who take the F1 Colours crown for 2013 with 15 points out of 20. Kudos as well to Ferrari, Sauber and Toro Rosso, who have all made improvements – albeit to varying degrees – that have impressed me this year.

All in all, though, it’s not what I’d call a vintage batch – and I’d see that as continuing a trend from last year. The average score for each livery across the 11 teams in 2012 was 13.45, and with HRT removed from the equation this time out, the 10 remaining teams make for an average of 13.00. There’s nothing out there that looks particularly awful – save perhaps the Lotus – and McLaren’s low score of 10 is largely due to the sheer (and almost insulting) lack of invention or effort.

But it does feel at the moment like liveries are in something of a repetitive rut – we can only hope for some major sponsor and/or team shakeups to change that in the coming years…

So that’s enough of my yakking. What do you think?

The post 2013 Liveries: The Verdict! appeared first on F1 Colours.

With the demise of HRT, we’re now left with just two of the new teams who joined the grid at the start of the 2010 season – and they both have different names. But both Caterham (as Lotus) and Marussia (as Virgin) had stonkingly excellent liveries upon their original launches, so how are they shaping up as they go into their respective fourth seasons?

Let’s look at Caterham first, then. In both 2011 and 2012, they disappointed me by moving away from the amazing 2010 car to a slightly weaker variant. I was never especially keen on the diagonal profile strip they introduced in 2011, nor the way they deployed the nose stripe after that first year. Interestingly, however, they seem this year to have moved partly away from the green-and-yellow styling, without ditching it entirely.

 

 

On to Marussia, meanwhile, and there’s further evidence of what was once a striking and superb red-and-black livery being reduced to… well, just something wholly bland, really.

  

And finally, although they haven’t yet held a proper launch, Williams have shown us their 2013 livery by sticking it on their 2012 car at the first round of testing:

Embed from Getty Images

And, well… it’s just a bit depressing, really, as a fan of the team, to see so few sponsors on the car and on their completely uninspiring new uniforms. Obviously the departure of Bruno Senna hasn’t helped much in that regard, and it’s not like the cars of the previous couple of years were plastered in names, but this feels even more stark. It sure feels like a long time ago that this was happening, eh?

Apologies for the lateness in catching up with these launches, by the way – real life got somewhat in the way over the last week. But I’ll be back to do a full roundup – and, most importantly, ranking the things – later in the week…

The post Caterham, Marussia and Williams (sort of) round off 2013 launches appeared first on F1 Colours.

Embed from Getty Images

Why am I saying this, when it goes against (a) everything I’ve previously said about hating liveries that stay the same year on year, and (b) everything I’ve previously said about this team’s car?

Well, perhaps it’s just that the car it should generally always be compared to – the Red Bull – is so ghastly. But just about everything that the parent car does wrong, this one seems to do right. It’s a better shade of blue. It actually advertises the company’s product clearly – with the name on the sidepods and everything. It’s got a consistent colour scheme, based around only three colours – the red of CEPSA on the rear wing, and the gold of Falcon on the front, actually fitting in with the colours STR first (almost presciently) used on the car back in 2006. And while, yeah, I’m still totally bored of that bull painting now, it does look a lot better reduced to just the engine cover (as it first was in 2009) than it did in the years prior.

And like Sauber, they have bothered to improve some of the things that didn’t work last year. With the messy detailing on and around the monocoque banished, in the profile view the car actually looks pretty clean and classy. I’ve said it before, but what it reminds me of now is a 1995 Sauber – and that’s no bad thing. The front view is still a lot busier, but hey – baby steps.

Frankly, if Red Bull want a decent Red Bull livery, they’d be better off flogging the other team to Infiniti – and letting them paint the whole damned thing purple – and starting again from scratch with the Little Italian Team That Could…

The post Toro Rosso: A Better Red Bull Than Red Bull appeared first on F1 Colours.

  

(Thank you, I’m here all week.)

Anyway, aside from the addition of a dying mobile phone company, it’s just about business as usual for Mercedes – who have refused to make the turquoise patches on their sidepod more solid and consistent like I asked them (honestly, Mercedes, don’t you read this site? Take some advice from Sauber, why don’t you?) but have instead sprayed a few streaks of the stuff along the sides of the nose cone instead. Cute.

  

(Incidentally, as with the days when Benetton did it, I find the idea of a team already named after a commercial non-racing-related company having a different title sponsor thoroughly bizarre, but there you go. It’s also one of the only times I can recall of a team cramming TWO different names onto the rear wing. How gauche.)

I don’t know. Three world titles, and all of a sudden the team think it’s okay to have their car look like it’s fallen out of one of their home town of Milton Keynes’ tackier eighties-themed nightclubs at three o’clock in the morning. Tsk.

The post 2013: The Year of Spray Paint? appeared first on F1 Colours.

Force India first, and obviously, this is a bit disappointing given that over the last few years they’ve tended to change the livery up a bit. There are very few differences between this one and the 2012 car, however – just as was always the case with Toyota (from whom the colour patterning seems to have been directly lifted), the pattern has been changed ever so slightly, but it’s barely discernible. And the major changes in sponsors (“Fly Kingfisher” disappearing due to the collapse of the airline, and Sahara being added to the rear wing) had already happened mid-season, with the only notable fresh difference is the movement of the United Breweries logo to the airbox (in an oddly-clashing blue-on-orange), while the “Q” logo on the wing (incidentally, does anyone know what this company is? They’re not listed as a “partner” on Findia’s website) gets a bit bigger.

I do still like this colour scheme (although I wish they’d gone more heavily with the orange), mind. It’s got character – just that the deployment is already a bit dated. And you do wonder what’ll happen to the team’s sponsorship portfolio if any more of Mallya’s brands go belly-up…

 
 

It’s happened in previous years and turned out not to be the case, so I’m wary of saying this for sure, but: it does look like the car’s gone back to a darker shade of red than the orangey Marlboro-style colour that’s been (mostly) used since 1997. It could just be the lighting, but over at F1 Fanatic, the comparison pictures do seem to show a noticeable darkening. Which is great, of course. As is the reintroduction of black into the colour scheme – okay, it’s not on the wings (which is where it clearly should be), but it’s definitely a start. And then there’s the lovely Italian flag stripe down the nose (extending it from the tip, where it appeared last year) – it seems to stop short at an odd point in these pictures, but I’d imagine that’s where the race numbers will go.

I still don’t like the engine cover logo (largely for the way it’s not symmetrical on each side), but that’s about my only criticism. All in all, I can’t recall liking a Ferrari livery this much for quite a while. Hurrah!

The post Ferrari! Findia! Friday! appeared first on F1 Colours.

Unless it had stayed exactly the same, this could only have been an improvement on the 2012 “effort”. Thankfully, it seems they actually took the advice I gave them last year (hello, Sauber livery designers, if you’re reading this!), finally ditching the mostly-white colour scheme of the BMW days and sensibly dressing the car in the shade of dark carbon-fibre grey that they’d inexplicably doused just the nose in a year ago.

  

See? Told you.

Still, we’re not here to talk about the car that might be, but the car that is. And yes, concerns over the dull nature of the grey itself aside, it’s undoubtedly an improvement. It’s got a far more coherent overall look than any of the team’s cars since their comeback have had, wisely putting most of the sponsor types in plain white while scaling down the coloured logos of Telmex and Cuervo to be far less intrusive. The only glaring standout now is the Claro logo, which still inexplicably fails to match the red elsewhere on the car. But other than that, this actually looks like it’s had thought put into it. We’re unlikely to remember it much in future years, but that’s present-day Sauber through-and-through, really.

The post Sauber Nearly Get It Right appeared first on F1 Colours.

 

The post Editor of F1 Livery Blog Struggles To Hide Disdain For McLaren That Looks The Same As Last Year appeared first on F1 Colours.

Oh, dear.

    

The JPS-aping livery was already somewhat compromised in previous years by the red wing endplates employed in 2011 and 2012 – but after my initial annoyance at its use in the first place, I have to admit it had somewhat grown on me. But the sudden introduction of even more red (despite actually now mostly removing it from the endplates) is just ghastly. I don’t know why Genii want to suddenly have a big red patch on the sidepod, but it looks disgusting. There’s not even any reason for the driver-naming red-painted airbox to be there. The only place the additional red looks good is on the front wing – indeed, if the red were deployed throughout the car in this way, as a secondary stripe added to the gold, it could look kind of cool. But the patches just look splashed on with little to no thought – it simply doesn’t work. At all.

I suppose I can’t complain too much when a team actually bothers to change the livery, as it gives me something to talk about, but  bloody hell. This isn’t actually a completely unsalvageable mess – it could be half-decent, with some tweaks, although the cluttering of sponsor logos is also a big problem. But by gum does it need those tweaks – because right now, it’s just hideous, and from what I can see from Twitter and such, that’s a prevailing early opinion among fans.

And it’s still got a stepped nose.

The post Lotus Show How To Screw Up Everyone’s Favourite Classic F1 Livery appeared first on F1 Colours.

So far, only two teams have announced launch dates: McLaren will unveil their MP4-28 on 31st January, while Force India will launch their challenger the next day on 1st February. The other news, of course – if you haven’t seen – is that there’ll only be 11 cars on the grid in 2013, following the folding of the HRT team after three years that saw them debut one utterly awful paint job and two quite lovely ones.

Stay tuned to F1 Colours to find out more about upcoming launches, not to mention coverage of them as and after they happen! I’m also going to finally start cranking the wheels on some new longer articles – so you can expect the next Livery Histories feature, this time taking in the history of Arrows, within the next couple of weeks…

The post Welcome to 2013! appeared first on F1 Colours.