For our team-by-team run-through, this year I’ve (again) dropped the category points system and just gone back to a simple mark out of ten. Because that’s just how I felt like judging them this year. To give an idea of how the marks fall, to get a 10 you’d basically have to be the 2010 Lotus, whereas a 5 represents something that’s disappointing but not downright dreadful. So, on with the ratings!

Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team

Once again it’s evolution not revolution for the champions; and once again, it’s a mixture of good and bad changes. The sidepod pattern is stronger than before, but it feels like there’s a little too much black on the car now, drowning out what should be a more predominant silver. 6/10

Scuderia Ferrari

A remarkable change in approach, with the decision to take inspiration from the 1970s apparently arrived upon at random. I really like this design (it looks especially good from the front), although it does feel weird to see a modern-style Ferrari with so much white on it. The things that harm it are the not-Marlboro flag on the engine cover, and that hugely incongruous UPS logo. Otherwise, this is their best in around a decade. 7/10

Williams Martini Racing

At what point do we start docking marks for them not changing it at all? Yes, the Martini design is lovely, but we’d be lying if we said it wasn’t getting a little old hat after three years. We don’t want to see them get rid of it, obviously, but mixing it up a bit would be nice. 7/10

Red Bull Racing

The matte colour job has grabbed all of the headlines, and it certainly is striking. I’m still not keen on the non-outlined “Red Bull” lettering (nor its slightly fluorescent colouring when out on track) but otherwise this is an excellent attempt at doing something new. Even without the matte, mind, it would be a huge improvement purely by virtue of going back to only three main colours, in a much more simplified design. 8/10

Sahara Force India Formula One Team

After all the excitement of potential linkups with Aston Martin and/or Johnnie Walker faded to nothing, we’re left with… basically exactly the same design as last season. Which isn’t a bad one at all, but is fairly easy to get bored of, and some variety would have been nice. 5/10

Renault Sport Formula One Team

Glory be, some colour! It’s striking just how much this adds to a field of 22 cars when they’re mostly dark colours, and for that alone we have to applaud it. But the yellow is still a little more muted than we’d hoped for, and while a very simple design means there’s nothing egregiously ugly about it, it really doesn’t feel very designed at all. Just a few lines here and there to define the shape of the car, especially around the nose, and this could have been an absolute classic instead of merely pretty good. 7/10

Scuderia Toro Rosso

There’s something oddly retro about this year’s Toro Rosso – having lost the CEPSA branding from the rear wing, they’ve replaced it with the Red Bull Cola ad they used to run a few years ago. Sponsor losses aside (other long-time partner Nova Chemicals are also gone), this is otherwise pretty much exactly the same as last year, and looks a little dated now that Red Bull have got their jazzy matte design. It would have seemingly made more sense to come up with something new for the sister team as well. 6/10

Sauber F1 Team

Also almost exactly the same as last year, except with a few sponsors added to the rear wing. I quite like the early 90s backmarker stylings of just sticking multi-coloured stickers on a white endplate like that, but otherwise both the good and bad aspects of this car are the same as in 2015 – that is, it’s nice that it’s a bit colourful (and the big race numbers are excellent), but that blue is far too plastic-looking. 5/10

McLaren Honda Formula 1 Team

I find this to be a really odd take on their much-improved second 2015 livery – I still like the “graphite” colour scheme, and I thought taking the weird stripe off the nose would be a good idea. But it hasn’t really been replaced with anything, and as such the whole front end of the car looks only half-designed. And while I love big race numbers, the font chosen for McLaren’s 14 and 22 looks really weird and slapdash. Still, nice to see they’ve actually got a few sponsors now – even if they’d look much better with one on the sidepod. 6/10

Manor Racing MRT

So for all the time that Marussia were in charge of this team, they never got around to painting the cars in their logo colours of red, blue and white. Then it finally goes back into the hands of Manor full-time… and it’s the first thing they do. Aside from that, I’m really impressed with this – I like the new team identity they’ve come up with generally (the uniforms are especially great), and it’s a neat, smart livery that cleverly masks the fact that they’re so badly lacking in sponsors, with lovely detail such as the shadowed “M” logo on the engine cover. But the best thing about this is that metallic shade of blue, which really does show Sauber how it should be done. Comfortably the prettiest thing on the grid this year. 8/10

Haas F1 Team

By contrast to Manor, this is a big disappointment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with silver/red/black as a colour scheme, it’s just that we’ve had too much of it on the grid lately, and the way it’s applied here is pretty uninspired. The front view, with a striking race number font, is probably the best angle – but with a complete lack of sponsors to boot, pretty much the only thing I really like about the car is the stars and stripes flag on the side. 6/10

So that’s my take on 2016. What do you reckon?

The post 2016 Liveries: The Verdict! appeared first on F1 Colours.

It’s not perfect, I have to say. They’ve gone for an obviously Red Bull-inspired matte paint job which looks fantastic in certain light, and slightly underwhelming in others – in fact, in the main studio shots, it actually looks like a slightly dull gold, reminiscent of the earlier variant of the ’96 Jordan. And they haven’t really introduced anything in the way of design to it, except for the hexagonal shapes that were already on the black version.

But in the launch photos (hopefully more representative of how it’ll look in the wild, especially under the lights of Singapore) it does look rather more striking; and aside from anything else, the simple fact is that this is a bright and colourful livery that’s unlike anything else on the grid, and for that we have to applaud it. And while it’s not as good as the 2010 Renault, at least the Total logo isn’t in red this time.

But if it is, you know what? I don’t care. I actually like that they’ve responded in this way, rather than waiting out a whole season (in much the same way as McLaren, to give them credit, did with their 2015 car). And this feeling is strengthened by the comments made by Cyril Abiteboule in the aftermath:

After declaring that its bold colours were a sign of a bigger push to do things differently in 2016, its F1 chief Cyril Abiteboul has revealed that it is evaluating some radical steps with the looks of its car over the season.

Speaking about the motivation for the new yellow livery, Abiteboul told Motorsport.com: “We want to create a little bit of a talking point and buzz, so expect to see that sort of thing to be played with.

“The car is a fantastic platform. It is a billboard and I am just surprised that people don’t play more with it.

“I know that there are rules and you are not supposed to change too much – but we are going to push that. It is such an obvious and cheap thing to do when you want people to talk about it.”

Abiteboul said that Renault felt it important to move away from the corporate grey and black colours that had been adopted by rival teams, as he suggested rivals were not making the most of opportunities.

“Frankly F1 cars are ugly,” he said. “I am ashamed by what we are doing.

“And frankly some teams are doing even worse than the regulations are driving us to do from a performance perspective. So we wanted also to be just good looking.”

When asked why he felt liveries were so dull now, Abiteboul said: “I think it is because everyone wants to tell a story about being premium. And if you want to be premium, the obvious thing to do is to be on the dark grey-ish side.

“Plus you have the teams that will obviously be dark grey or silver like Mercedes and McLaren. So that is already two. And there are a number of teams that want to do the same.

“So, I don’t know why really people are not going a bit more bullish with their colours. It is like they want to disappear. We don’t want to disappear, it is a statement and there is no hideaway. We will have to deal with what we do on track.”

Abiteboul suggested that tweaks to Renault’s colours could come as early as the Bahrain Grand Prix, because the team was still working out how well the matte yellow it has chosen works on television and in images.

“It might happen as soon as race two because we are not 100% sure yet of the reaction and how it looks under different lights,” he said. “Adjustment is something that we are allowed to think on. But we would want to do more.

“I am thinking one good example is the BMW Art Car. Everyone will remember BMW for their fantastic cars: It is a fantastic platform and I am amazed that no one is making better use of that. Small things; small details – but why not?”

We couldn’t agree more, Cyril. And now that we have all the liveries, we can do our delayed 2016 roundup (including the Toro Rosso, which – er – we haven’t mentioned because they never really unveiled it, just started running with it in testing one day and it was basically exactly the same as before, right?), so look out for that hopefully before qualifying starts on Saturday morning. Hopefully.

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However, we still quite like this livery – even though the blue looks a bit too plasticy rather than metallic – so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Also, there’s something quite early ’90s about having a white rear wing endplate on which you can put all your differently-coloured minor sponsor logos rather than slapping them onto the main colour scheme (as Sauber have done quite badly in the recent past).

So yes, we didn’t expect anything different from them, but this time around we don’t really mind.

The post The New Sauber Is Basically The Same As The Old Sauber But With A Few More Sponsors appeared first on F1 Colours.

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Yet as soon as they sell the team back to Manor, what happens? Well, first the car gets some additional blue partway through last season, courtesy of a sponsorship deal; and then, for 2016, their first full season as “Manor Racing” rather than “Manor Marussia”, they finally go… full-on blue and red (and black and white).

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And okay, this livery isn’t perfect. It’s almost entirely lacking in sponsors (although they have at least got a couple), and once again we’d have to quibble about the fact that after black and grey, the most common colours on the grid in 2016 are red, white and blue. But, nobody else has got them in this combination, and the blue is a particularly lovely metallic shade that calls to mind my beloved Prost Acer. It certainly looks a lot more striking out on track than last year’s car did, or indeed than the plastic-blue Sauber (which, incidentally, looks to have retained an almost identical livery this year, just with a few additional sponsors on the wing). And while the text on the car is sparse, I really like the team’s new, clean and simple typography.

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If nothing else, it’s a splash of colour on a grid that’s otherwise mostly lacking in it – and for that alone, unless Renault (or, more drastically, Toro Rosso) come out with a bright yellow car in the next fortnight, I’d say that’s enough to win them the 2016 “Best Livery” stakes.

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Well, that or the fact that they are basically now the London Weekend Television logo.

The post Have Manor Won the 2016 Livery Competition? appeared first on F1 Colours.

Is it unreasonable to expect a new team to come into the sport with something exciting and interesting? Maybe, but back in 2010 we had Lotus and Virgin with some pretty fantastic liveries (and yes, the Virgin was red/black/white, but that was at a time when there weren’t as many cars that looked like that) – statements of intent that instantly fostered goodwill for the new guys. The problem with this one is that you can instantly name at least three or four previous cars it reminds you of (the 2011 HRT, the 2006 Midland, the early 2010s Saubers…), so it doesn’t really give the team much of an immediate identity.

It doesn’t help, either, that it’s completely lacking in sponsors, with the exception of Richard Mille (who also feature in similarly small fashion on the McLaren, as it happens). It looks instantly backmarker-ish, and that nifty stars and stripes on the flank can only really go so far.

But judged entirely on its own merits, it is probably one of the nicer cars on the grid. It’s just so spectacularly uninteresting that it’s hard to want to approve of it too much.

And so we wait to see if Manor can perhaps come up with something vaguely inspiring instead. At the moment, though, I’m not holding out a huge amount of hope.

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First up it’s McLaren, who it’s fair to say we’ve given a significant amount of stick to for their liveries ever since their Vodafone deal ended. But this 2016 effort… well, it’s certainly the best they’ve had since the chrome job went away:

You still get the sense that Ron Dennis feels like livery designs and sponsorship are something that should happen to other teams, not his. But if we accept that we’re never going to get either a white/red Marlboro homage nor an orange McLaren ever again, then this is an ongoing team identity that’s much easier to get behind than the terribly bland silver and black that preceded it. Certainly, if they’d launched with this back at the start of 2014, I think we’d all have been a lot more favourable about it and them. Can they give us some more interesting team uniforms to go with it, though?

On to Mercedes, then, who unsurprisingly stick with the silver-with-black-and-turquoise that’s served them so well so far. Again, though, this might be the best implementation of it that they’ve yet had:

And finally, we come to Williams, who unsurprisingly have made basically no tweaks whatsoever to their 2015 livery, despite some minor changes in sponsorship placement:

 

And of course, we’ve had another team launch their car today… but we’ll have more on that one a bit later.

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Yes, the intent is obviously for us all to be put in mind of the classic 312T, which the team raced (in various forms) between 1974 and 1981, picking up three championships along the way. Lauda, Regazzoni, Villeneuve, Scheckter – they’ve all driven a Ferrari with that distinctive white hood and Italian flag stripes, and now Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen will be doing so as well.

(Of course, if you wanted to be cruel, you could also point out that it wasn’t exactly a brilliant omen the last time the team had a car that looked like this, in 1993 – but that’s obviously not the year they’re looking to evoke.)

I’ve said many times since launching this site that as far as I’m concerned, a Ferrari should be red with black wings (and a bit of yellow). But if we can’t have that? This is pretty much the next-best thing.

But I still wish they’d get rid of that sodding fake-Marlboro flag on the engine cover…

The post The New Ferrari Is One Lauda appeared first on F1 Colours.

 
 

• That matte paint job. Something genuinely distinctive and different, and which we don’t see in F1 very often (if at all, before? Not that I can recall, anyway) If there’s a downside it’s that in certain lighting it’s going to look black – which isn’t bad in and of itself, but it is if that’s what colour the Renault’s going to be – but it’s a really nice shade of blue, much more striking than in previous seasons.
• The whole thing’s a lot tidier and smarter than at any point since the team’s earliest liveries. The additional AT&T sponsorship fits on nicely without doing anything clashy, and I like the simple, smart red line on the side of the monocoque.
• THE PURPLE IS GONE, HOORAY, THE HORRIBLE SHINY INFINITI PURPLE IS ALL GONE

The Bad

• This comes close to scuppering the whole thing, but I really don’t like the way the “Red Bull” text on the sidepod doesn’t have any kind of outline or shadow – the plain red on the blue background just doesn’t work. Imagine how much better it would look if the letters were outlined in white?

The I’m-Not-Quite-Sure-Yet

• The redesigned charging bull on the engine cover, which is now entirely yellow and red without any white, is an interesting change in style, and it does look pretty good. However, I still think it would maybe look better with white on it (indeed, if they changed the sidepod lettering to be outlined white, then it definitely would), and as it stands, this feels a little more STR than RBR?

Still, on the whole, I’m giving this a tentative thumbs-up. The matte paint is a really strong idea that instantly sets the team apart – and hey, isn’t “really strong idea that instantly sets the team apart” basically what we want from any livery?

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It’s certainly smart, there’s no denying that. A plain black car with just white sponsor logos can look fantastic, and there’s no harm in the additional yellow touches, either. I liked this livery fine enough when it was appearing on Minardis in the 1980s, for example.

But the disappointment, and the feeling that it’s all just a bit dull, stems from the fact that Renault’s return to F1 was supposed to herald the glorious return of yellow as a colour scheme for the first time since 2010. Alright, so there’s still a chance that Haas will go down that route (although sod’s law being what it is, what price they’ve also gone for a conservative, mostly-black job?) but when all’s said and done, we’ve had a fair few black cars on the grid in the last decade (including the last few run by this very team), so this doesn’t feel like the dramatic step into the brand new that we were all hoping for.

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Now, it’s fairly obvious that what’s happened with this car is that they’ve had to take off the Infiniti branding, now that they’re no longer partnered with that marque; but I find it interesting that they’ve gone so far as to, rather than leave the sidepods blank, put a big Red Bull logo on there in its place. Plus, Daniel Ricciardo’s number 3 has undergone a facelift, flipping the colours and getting a new font that makes it seem deliberately reminiscent of Dale Earnhardt’s NASCAR number.

And of course, losing Infiniti also means we’re shot of that ghastly purple that had adorned the car for the past couple of years. Coupled with the fact that the red/silver/blue stripes that used to be on the nosecone got ditched last year, it leaves the car almost entirely blue – and it’s hard to deny that it looks a fair bit smarter than at almost any other point since the team came in. Heck, it basically looks like the good old 1995 Sauber, and we can’t say we’re disappointed by that.

Of course, this could all be misdirection – they might yet have a new sponsor to announce, they could bring back the stripes, they could even make a bit more of TAG Heuer and their corporate green. But if this ended up being the livery that they take to the grid in Melbourne come March, I’d be plenty happy.

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