Whether or not this deal ends up actually happening – and if it does, if it ends up lasting – it’s the latest in a long line of energy drink partners getting involved with F1 teams. In some cases (well, one case) it’s a huge, internationally renowned brand buying not one, but two F1 teams and committing wholesale to them for well over a decade. But in other instances, a brand you’ve never heard of suddenly shows up on a sidepod for a few races and then disappears never to be heard from again. Indeed, if you’ve ever seen a random name on an F1 car and you’re not quite sure what the company does, then chances are, it’s a short-lived energy drink.

It’s unsurprising that the biggest energy drink brand in the world – the one that essentially brought the very concept to Western masses – is also the one with the longest history in F1. Red Bull were far from the massive corporate giant that they are now, however, when they first started sponsoring the Sauber team in 1995. Instead, they were an upstart young brand who were making waves through non-traditional and guerilla marketing efforts – and who saw F1 as a good way to further draw attention to themselves.

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Their first F1 livery is still one of the best they’ve had – a smart dark blue effort that pushed their brand prominently without any real competition. But from 1996 onwards, they were forced to share the limelight at Sauber with Petronas, who brought their distinctive turquoise onto the car. Red Bull remained title sponsor through 2001, but were somewhat overshadowed in terms of identification with the team by Petronas’ badging of Sauber’s Ferrari engine deal from 1997 onwards. So it was perhaps unsurprising that they reduced their involvement with the team from 2002 onwards.

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Not least because they had also moved into individual driver sponsorship, having founded a driver development programme at the turn of the century. Having started to bring drivers up to F1 via their “Red Bull Junior Team” (a rebranding of RSM Marko) in Formula 3000, their branding made it onto the Arrows of Enrique Bernoldi in 2001 and 2002, and Christian Klien’s Jaguar in 2004.

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In 2005, of course, they purchased the latter team – in the process ending their Sauber deal – and the rest is history. Despite initial scepticism over whether or not they would stick it out, they turned the Milton Keynes-based squad into one of the most successful and enduring F1 teams of the modern era, winning consecutive drivers and constructors championship doubles between 2010 and 2013. And they bought the ailing Minardi team at the end of 2005, turning them into their secondary Scuderia Toro Rosso outfit which has similarly endured.

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So it’s perhaps not surprising that other energy drinks brands have looked at Red Bull and decided they might want a piece of F1 themselves. And actually, while Red Bull’s sponsorship of Sauber began at the start of 1995, it was later that same season that another brand began a long association with the sport, in the shape of Hype Energy.

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Hype was launched in 1994 by one of the founders of the Hard Rock Cafe, and made its first appearance on an F1 car in 1995, taking over a significant part of the Arrows (Footwork) car from the Portugese Grand Prix onwards.

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For 1996, however, Hype set their sights further up the grid – and nabbed a smaller, but more prestigious, slot on the barge boards of the then-constructors’ champions, Benetton. And the following year, they sponsored that year’s reigning champions, in exactly the same place on the side of the Williams; and with the same strategy of using a bright fluorescent colour that was totally at odds with the rest of the livery and had the presumably desired effect of making people go “What the hell is this Hype thing?”

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By the end of 1997, however, Hype had left the paddock, concentrating on other areas of motorsport instead. But their association with F1 didn’t end there, as former Jordan driver Bertrand Gachot got involved with their distribution, eventually becoming the company’s CEO. In 2014, he got them back into the sport by way of a deal with Caterham driver Andre Lotterer – and the following year, they began to sponsor Force India, which they continue to do to this day.

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It’s worth noting, incidentally, that Hype only became available to buy here in the UK earlier this year. Indeed, non-availability in many of the countries that watch the sport is often a recurring theme for energy drinks brands that get into F1. Take Power Horse, one of the earliest competitors to Red Bull. They entered F1 during that same mid-90s heyday – in fact, they replaced Hype as a sponsor of the Arrows team in 1996, having debuted earlier that year briefly on the Ligier.

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Arrows had two different liveries in ’96 – they switched to an all over red and blue scheme when TWR took over fully – but although Power Horse were a prominent sponsor, neither livery was based around their silver and red colour scheme. The same was true in 1997, when Arrows switched to a white and blue livery, with Danka as their title sponsor. Power Horse continued to sponsor the team with a prominent rear wing slot – but dropped out partway through the season amid rumours of financial difficulties.

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The brand still exists, but is not generally available in the UK. Amusingly, Power Horse also had a corner named after it at the Osterreichring, during the 1996-2003 period when it was known as the A1-Ring. Unsurprisingly, the name did not continue when Red Bull bought the circuit.

1997 seems to have been the peak year for energy drink products appearing on cars – as, along with Red Bull on the Sauber, Hype on the Williams and Power Horse on the Arrows, there was another tie-up – NRG, who had a small sponsorship deal with Tyrrell for that year only. Like Red Bull and Power Horse, NRG hailed from Austria – but they were a much shorter-lived venture and seem to have disappeared by around the turn of the century.

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Meanwhile, maybe there was just something about the Arrows team that made energy drinks want to sponsor them, but there was a fifth such brand that made an appearance on their cars between the mid-1990s and their 2002 demise. This one, however, was a doozy. It all began in 1999, when Nigerian Prince Malik Ado Ibrahim bought a 25% stake in the team. As part of his marketing efforts, he came up with a brand called T-Minus, which was initially trailed mysteriously via a “countdown” on the cars’ sidepods over the course of several races.

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When it was finally unveiled, it transpired that T-Minus was intended as a brand that could be licensed and applied to products by other partners. Whether or not it was actually a viable enterprise, we would never really find out – as Ibrahim, and the brand, had disappeared from F1 before the season was out. In the process, pretty much the only product that had ever made it out into the world with the T-Minus label on it was… you guessed it, an energy drink.

T-Minus wasn’t the only short-lived F1 related energy drink to make it into the world, either. In 2001, Eddie Jordan was emboldened by his team’s successes both on the track and in marketing over the preceding few years, and spun off his brand into a drink named EJ-10 (although curiously, the car of the same name had actually already finished competing, having run in the 2000 season). As with T-Minus, Jordan’s intent was that the name and branding could be applied across a wide range of different products licensed by other partners.

While it was initially successful, however, the drink’s launch coincided with a downturn in Jordan’s fortunes both on and off the track. They lost their famous Benson & Hedges title sponsorship (although the brand would still appear on the car in reduced form for a few more seasons), and were embroiled in a court case with Vodafone over a deal that was purportedly designed to replace it. Suddenly, having a vanity brand on the car looked less like the work of a team on the up, and more like one desperately filling space. In 2003 and 2004, the cars carried the branding of the spinoff drink V-10 (essentially an EJ-10 and vodka cocktail) but the writing was on the wall.

EJ-10’s failure didn’t put off other teams from trying to launch their own brands, though: and when Tony Fernandes’ newly-founded Lotus team pitched up in 2010, they quickly tried to branch out into the energy drink field as well. LR8 was the name of their “all natural” energy drink (named for “Lotus Racing” and the eight ingredients, apparently). Despite sharing a can design with one of my favourite ever car liveries, however, the brand quickly hit a snag, thanks to the dispute over the use of the name “Lotus”.

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While the team were still called Lotus in 2011, Fernandes moved quickly to rebrand the energy drink, with his team’s cars carrying the new brand EQ8 (no, I don’t know what it stands for either) for the next two seasons. EQ8 actually proved quite successful, making it onto UK high street shelves – but as Caterham began to struggle financially in late 2013 and 2014, the brand seemed to gradually disappear. It had a small presence on the first iteration of the 2014 Caterham livery, and also served as naming sponsor for Caterham’s GP2 outfit; but was nowhere to be seen once Fernandes sold the team later in the year.

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A rather more successful drinks brand, Lucozade, had a brief flirtation with F1 in the early 2010s, sponsoring McLaren between late 2011 and 2013. Their logo alternated rear wing space with the team’s title sponsors Vodafone, and given that it came so soon after Red Bull won their first title, it’s hard not to see the linkup as a deliberate bit of spoiling. Unfortunately for Lucozade, though, the sponsorship coincided with a significant dip in McLaren’s form, and when the team launched their Vodafone-less silver and black livery at the start of 2014, Lucozade were similarly nowhere to be seen.

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Of the various energy drink brands that have proven consistent competitors to Red Bull rather than flash in the pans in recent years, Monster Energy are perhaps the most prominent, with a marketing portfolio across a variety of different sports. They began sponsoring Mercedes in 2010, but stepped up their involvement once Lewis Hamilton joined the team.

Interestingly, Monster don’t position themselves so much as a sponsor of the Mercedes team, as they do of the drivers individually – Hamilton prominently, and Bottas almost kind of by extension/default – and they don’t brand on the cars themselves, only on the drivers’ helmets and uniforms. They’re a popular brand for fan livery designers to base cars on, though, and we wouldn’t be completely surprised if they stepped up their involvement to become a major title sponsor – if not of Mercedes then potentially elsewhere – in future years.

It’s clear, then, that Rich Energy are looking to improve their standing in a crowded market, by getting visibility in an area where two of the biggest players are (in one case extremely) prominent. Will they be another Red Bull, or another T-Minus? Haas obviously believe in them, having elected to give up title sponsorship of the team for the first time, but scepticism over their role in the Force India saga remains. Either way, we’ll find out next year…

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Another tough year to call, with the new metallic green Jaguar, the BMW Williams, the Telefonica Minardi and another iteration of the silver McLaren. But the Orange Arrows takes it for all kinds of reasons – it reintroduces a much-missed colour to the grid, adding much needed variety. It has a sponsor name that also works as a description of the car itself. It doesn’t clutter the car unnecessarily with extra colours like subsequent years would. And it’s also just flipping lovely.

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Another one that looks incredibly Indycar-ish – but it’s a really, really pretty car, and a vast improvement on the predominantly white one it replaced partway into the season. The use of silver rather than white to separate the red and blue works really well, and while there are a cluster of different sponsors, they generally don’t clash, even when there are bits of yellow on the side. The only bit that falters is that lighter blue Quest logo on the nose. But this still stands out amid a field that included very good Tyrrell, Jordan, Benetton and Sauber designs.

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There haven’t been enough orange cars in F1, and most of the ones there have been have been Arrows (Arrowses?) This one is lovely, though, from the black-on-orange sponsoring of the top portion, to the sidepods that look like a sheet of graph paper.

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At the time of their demise, the team had one of the most noteworthy liveries in F1, courtesy of their dramatic and memorable Orange-sponsored scheme – although it had been diluted somewhat by secondary sponsors by this point, as we’ll see. But it was just one of a line of varied and often inspired designs the team employed in their lifetime, showing that what they lacked in race-winning craft, they frequently made up for in livery quality…

1978-80 – Warsteiner

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When the team made its debut in 1978, it did so in a car that was – unlike many startup teams of the era – already able to call on a strong visual identity, courtesy of a sponsorship deal with independent brewery Warsteiner. Despite the classy air it tends to lend a car, gold as a main colour tends to be rare in F1 – although it was present in the sport in the late ’70s as an accent on the black cars of Wolf and Lotus. The all-gold styling of the 1978 Arrows, therefore, was a bold step.

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The following year, however, Arrows repainted the A1 car that they were carrying forwards by adding a black stripe that covered the entire nose and engine cover. An improvement to the livery was that the Warsteiner logo was now in white, rather than black – and stood out significantly more – but otherwise, it was a shame that the all-gold car was so quickly ditched.

Fortunately, the black-and-gold effort was ditched even more quickly. Arrows switched chassis partway through 1979 – as they had done in ’78 – and this time decided to tweak the livery, as well. The black engine cover remained, but was much smaller – and the gold nose cone was restored.

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The livery was largely the same in 1980, albeit with an odd little addition – new sponsorship from Penthouse (the, ahem, “adult” magazine), whose name appeared in conjunction with cigarette paper manufacturer Rizla, just as it had done on the Hesketh in 1977.

1981-82 – Ragno

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Although Arrows again carried the same car – this time the A3 – to the start of the next season, in 1981 a new year meant an entirely new livery. Warsteiner were out, replaced by Italian ceramic tile makers Ragno – who brought with them an orange colour scheme. For the (eventually run as a) non-championship race in South Africa in February, the car was seen simply in all orange with black decals – but things were freshened up as the season proper drew on, with a much smarter design that included white sidepods in an unusual checked design that had the look of graph paper.

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The following year, despite having been absent from the car in ’81, Penthouse – this time without Rizla – returned alongside another Ragno livery that this time made white a heavier feature. Something about it lost the verve that the ’81 effort had had, however – with the lines not really complementing the design of the A4 (or its successor, the A5) as well as they had on the A3.

1983 – Various

Come 1983, however, Ragno were gone – and without a main title sponsor, Arrows underwent one of the most bizarre seasons that an established team (as they undoubtedly were by this point) has gone through, livery-wise. The base car had simply a white colour scheme – which, at its worst, had no more than a couple of sponsor decals – but throughout the year, various partners were brought in for one or a few races at a time, and in some cases were allowed to add large patches of colour, including red and green, to the car. It was haphazard and chaotic, and frankly, I don’t actually have to hand full evidence of exactly how many distinct liveries were deployed. Below are just some of the liveries I’ve been able to get images of, but let me know in the comments if you have any more!

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1984-86 – Barclay

Thank heavens for 1984, then, which brought Arrows a brand-new title sponsor, and a proper visual identity once more. Tobacco company Barclay, who would later plant their beige colour scheme on parts of the Williams, would here get to deck out the car. Hardly the most exciting colour, but with the accents of burgundy – and the blue sidepods brought by skiing equipment manufacturers Nordica – it actually looked kind of good.

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Nordica only stuck around for a year, however, and so in 1985 it was the turn of De’Longhi to adorn the sidepods. With a more colourful logo, things were hence a little more clashy – but by the same token, the rest of the car looked a bit smarter, with a tidier rear wing endplate, and the Barclay logo swooping ever-so-slightly, but effectively, over the engine cover.

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Barclay’s final year as title sponsor was in 1986, but their replacement had also already snuck onto the car that year – the third new sidepod name in succession was that of insurance company USF&G. Their plain logo, along with the departure of a number of other sponsors, made for a neat and tidy car – but also one that seemed a little bit insipid by comparison with the previous two years.

1987-89 – USF&G

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Despite reportedly suffering from financial difficulties in the late ’80s, USF&G took over as Arrows’ lead sponsors for the 1987 season. Although they retained their spot on the sidepod, they took the opportunity to give the team a somewhat American-looking red-white-and-blue colour scheme. The engine cover sponsor varied – sometimes showing the deliciously retro logo of engine badge Megatron, and sometimes the nicely complimentary blue of Italian fashion brand Trussardi.

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The livery was similar in 1988, albeit with a changed logo for rear wing endplate sponsor Camozzi, which would persist until 1991. But in 1989, the dramatically changed shape of the car – due to the banning of turbo-aspirated engines – gave a larger white canvas upon which USF&G could now place their logo, with the smaller sidepods hence reducing the overall amount of red on the car.

1990-93 – Footwork

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Arrows were joined by another brand new sponsor in 1990, as Japanese logistics company Footwork pumped enough money into the team to wrestle control of the livery away from USF&G – although the former title sponsors did keep their name on the car’s sidepod. Although the red stripes were a nice touch, in this first year they were perhaps a little under-employed, making for a slightly uninspired look.

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Along with buying full naming rights to the team, Footwork took a better hold on the design in 1991 – although still a predominantly white car, the Footwork logos were picked out a lot better, and the overall look was also improved by the addition of Shell logos. There was still perhaps a little too much white space, but all in all this was the smartest car the team had had in some time.

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Shell were replaced by BP for 1992, with the green logo not complementing the design quite as well as the yellow-and-red had, but with the addition of further red blocks to the airbox, the overall effect was a bit more coherent. Driver Aguri Suzuki, meanwhile, brought sponsorship from Toshiba.

Indeed, the team evidently liked the livery enough that they continued with an almost identical one in 1993, upon which the only major change – and certainly an improvement – was the expansion of the BP logos to become part of the actual livery rather than simply a rectangular decal.

1994-96 – Matrix Design

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Although Footwork were still running the team, in 1994 they decided to take a different tack with the livery. A company called Matrix Design – who also got their name on the car in the process – came up with what might just be the most firmly 1990s-esque paint job of the entire decade. The car was still predominantly white, but this time the previous secondary colours of blue and red were splattered across the car in apparently random (but presumably very carefully laid out by a quite expensive designer) geometric patterns – and there were also splotches of yellow and green.

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Nevertheless, it worked as a surprisingly coherent effort, but something went badly wrong in 1995. To begin with, the design was a simple enough refinement of the previous year’s – a bit more heavy on the red, and with a few more sponsors cluttering things up, but otherwise smart enough. But then Hype came along.

As far as I can see, Hype – an energy drink brand that took the novel step of advertising the brand in F1 before actually producing the drink – started sponsoring Arrows at Portugal – although they may have come along earlier, my trusty copy of Murray Walker’s Grand Prix Year doesn’t provide pictorial evidence – and in doing so they took over the engine cover completely for some races, painting it blue – and adding their fluorescent pink logo – but not actually changing the rest of the car. Essentially, it was as if someone had used the “fill” tool in MS Paint, and it just looked ghastly. The airboxes, to which Sasol’s logo had moved, were actually painted red on one car, and blue on the other – but on the latter this created an especially awful effect, with two clashing shades of blue.

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And the car looked even worse by the time of the final race at Adelaide, since Hype’s penchant for fluorescence meant that the previously-red areas of the car were now bright pink. Salvation was at hand, however, as Hype decided to up sticks to Williams and Benetton for 1996 – and Footwork were on the way out, as well…

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New owner Tom Walkinshaw bought the team in March 1996 – too late to rebrand the outfit as “TWR Arrows” this time out (in fact, on the season’s entry list the team were still officially Footwork), and indeed at the start of the season the cars had continuity of sorts in the livery. With the fluorescent stylings of Hype thankfully gone, the ’96 car started the season looking quite like it had a year earlier – although the “splattering” was toned down considerably, and there was a new energy drink in town, courtesy of the Austrian Power Horse brand. Walkinshaw had also secured another major sponsor, in the shape of Philips.

1996 – TWR

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But there were changes afoot by the time the teams rolled up at Europe. TWR had now officially and fully taken over, and unveiled a brand new livery to ring in the changes. This was a simply awesome effort – predominantly red, with secondary blue and white as an accent, it was simple, yet stylish and effective. Perhaps the only downside was that it made the cars look a little too much like they should have been driving around ovals in the USA – but otherwise, it marked the team out as a serious concern. Unfortunately, this design only lasted until the end of the year – but fortunately, it was replaced by something even better…

1997 – Danka (I)

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Arrows’ 1997 car was launched in a blaze of publicity – probably the first blaze of publicity the team had ever had for a pre-season launch – as the shock of incoming world champion Damon Hill joining the team began to sink in. Indeed, it’s probably still the thrill of that launch – as a young, relatively new F1 fan who was seeing “my” driver join what was for all intents and purposes a brand new unknown team – and the launch images of Damon with the car and its big fat “1” on the nosecone, that contribute to my affection for the livery.

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It is a lovely car, though. It’s bold and chunky, it works the sponsor logos into the colour scheme (rather than allowing them to stick out from it), and although the shift to a predominantly blue and white scheme is unusual (with Arrows’ traditional red relegated to a tertiary colour used largely for Power Horse’s spots – and even that changed later in the season when Danka took over the rear wing), it works pretty well. As with the ’96 car, it’s only surprising that they only kept it for a single year…

1998 – Danka (II)

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… but then, perhaps TWR wanted to signal their intent to move away from the disaster that was (Hungaroring aside) Hill’s truncated stint with the team, and hence the ’98 livery, which kept almost all of the same sponsors, but in a dramatic new colour scheme. Or, rather, absence of colour scheme.

This was simply one of those remarkable ideas that, when they happen, you wonder why nobody had thought of them before. Sure, we’d had all-black F1 cars in the past – in the early ’90s alone there was Andrea Moda and the ’93/94 Saubers – but here, Arrows had insisted on a completely monochrome look, with every single sponsor logo forced into white text. Well, almost every single one – Bridgestone and Quest were allowed to keep flashes of red, which compromised the approach slightly, but on the whole this was an inspired and hugely memorable effort.

1999 – Repsol / T-Minus

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1999 was a bizarre season for Arrows, as the promise of investment from the mysterious Prince Malik Ado Ibrahim, and his even more mysterious “T-Minus” brand, overshadowed the first half of the year. The black car from the previous season had already been embellished by splashes of red, white and orange courtesy of a big new deal with Repsol – which meant a livery that, while not as immediately inspired as the previous year’s, was still kind of smart (and the sponsor, brought by incoming driver Pedro de la Rosa, was vital following the departure of Danka). But for the first few races, the cars’ sidepods carried a mysterious countdown to what was apparently going to be an exciting and revolutionary new brand launch.

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In the end, however, T-Minus turned out to be an almighty white elephant, a pointless branding exercise that didn’t bring a single penny to the team, and Ibrahim was gone before the season was out. Later in the year, software company BaaN took over the sidepods instead.

2000-2002 – Orange

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Having introduced orange back to the team’s cars the previous year, it became the dominating feature once more, some 19 years after the first Ragno car. This was courtesy of a new sponsorship deal – and one that pretty much rescued the team – with mobile phone giants Orange. Quite aside from being an utterly gorgeous paint job on a neat and tidy little chassis design (albeit one that sadly couldn’t translate its often excellent qualifying pace into decent reliability and points finishes), part of the joy of this arrangement is that the car could simultaneously be called the “Orange Arrows” (i.e. the official team name on the entry list) and the “orange Arrows” (describing the look of the car itself). It’s rare for a small team to come up with one of those completely perfect, memorable, iconic sponsor/livery arrangements, but it’s something that Arrows undoubtedly managed in 2000.

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The following year, changes were made to accommodate engine marque Asiatech (the suppliers of rebadged old Peugeot machines), and secondary sponsor Red Bull (brought in by driver Enrique Bernoldi), and although the additional colours they brought with them threw the design slightly off-theme, it was still pretty strong.

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Sadly, the team themselves continued on a downwards trend, both in terms of results and financially. Despite the hiring of Heinz-Harald Frentzen, the 2002 season was catastrophic – and this was reflected by a livery for the A23 car that, while it still boasted Orange’s presence, felt like a bad cover version of the original 2000 design. The lines didn’t feel right, it was suddenly bereft of most of its original sponsors, and the ones it had left were suddenly harming the colour scheme – most notably the awful addition of Red Bull’s yellow to both the airbox and the nose. Even so, though, it was a car that would only compete in twelve events that year – and it was disqualified from one of those and deliberately failed to qualify for another – as chronic money problems that this time even having such high-profile sponsors as Orange and Red Bull couldn’t solve (this is what happens when you don’t pay your driver and he becomes the third driver to sue you in the space of a couple of years) killed the team off for good.

Red Bull, of course, still had other spots in F1 courtesy of their sponsorship of Sauber and imminent purchase of some team or other, but Orange haven’t been seen in the sport since – a shame, as their presence did, and still could, make for a genuinely distinctive and exciting livery.

Postscript: 2006 – Super Aguri

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>Incidentally, although it wasn’t an Arrows livery, it behoves us as a postscript to mention the fact that the A23 did actually enter Grands Prix subsequent to the team’s demise. It was Minardi who had first attempted to make a later car out of it – ultimately rejecting it for 2003 in favour of a modification of their own 2002 car – but in 2006 it made a surprising return, as the basis for Super Aguri’s ill-fated effort. We can’t be sure whether any of the SA05s, as they were now called, actually were the same physical cars as had run in Orange livery in 2002, or if the design was just used as a basis – but what the heck, let’s call it a “bonus Arrows livery” anyway. Especially since it didn’t look a million miles away from the team’s early ’90s, Footwork-branded days…

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The long-suffering Arrows team underwent something of a rebirth (brief as it was) at the turn of the century, having endured a pretty lousy end to the previous decade – the high-profile failure of the Damon Hill experiment, the uncertainty and constant rebranding that took place during an ill-fated 1999 – and in addition to rolling out a surprisingly neat and tidy car that was among the fastest of all in a straight line that year, and with journeyman workhorse Jos Verstappen in the form of his career, one of the more prominent changes was an overhaul of the team’s visual identity, thanks to a linkup with Orange that gave the team one of the most memorable liveries of recent years. The team had already begun to introduce a combination of black and orange on the ’99 car – which was predominantly black but with flashes of red, white and orange through sponsorship with Repsol – and this was followed up with a design that made the orange more prevalent in deference to the new sponsors. Orange is a colour that hasn’t been too widely used in F1 – partly as it has a habit of not showing up well on TV cameras, as Spyker found to their cost last year – but the Arrows of 2000-2002 made you wonder why people didn’t try it more often. Combined with enough black to offset it, it stood out as distinctive without ever being garish. The fact that the 2000 car was such a well-designed machine, too, meant that the lines couldn’t help but look smart. The cars of the following two seasons would refine the layout – increasing the ratio of black to orange – but they also messed up the simplicity somewhat with multi-coloured sponsor logos such as Asiatech and Red Bull, and given how much of a breath of fresh air the scheme was on its first appearance, it’s a shame that it had become somewhat tiresome by the time the team folded. Nevertheless, it gave Arrows a distinctive and memorable visual identity for arguably the first time in their history – with the added bonus that the phrase “Orange Arrows” could refer either to the team’s official entry name, or simply a description of their car!

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