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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It took them a few goes, and the 1997 livery was the best they managed with a striped pattern; but in 1998, Benetton finally got their Mild Seven scheme to perfection, by making a bit of a drastic change in approach. The predominantly sky blue car is beautiful, and separates from a white sidepod – designed to allow for differently-coloured sponsor logos – with Mild Seven’s secondary darker blue. And red works superbly as a minor accent colour. It’s only a shame that the following year, they’d already started to tinker with it a bit too much, and removing the white in 2000 made it extremely bland. 1998 is a tough year to call, with the Winfield Williams and black Arrows also in there, but this is one of my absolute favourites of all time.

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Benetton first tried their “lots of different coloured blocks” livery in 1987, and it looked terrible. For 1988, they cut down the number of colours, shuffled things around a bit, and came up with something much better. Yes, it does look like a couple of different cars sliced together, but for all of that it works and it’s memorable.

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We still can’t get behind the multi-coloured tyres that look like fruit Polos, but otherwise this is an utterly iconic and striking design, and it’s a surprise that Benetton only kept it for one season. The splashes of paint give a really effective sense of speed, and the colours are carefully placed so as not to look like the completely incoherent mess it would have been very easy to fall into.

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And, of course, it helps that they had some pretty smart liveries around that time. But the sky blue and white Mild Seven livery was just one in a series of multi-coloured efforts that the team would employ during their fifteen-year tenure in the sport – fitting, really, for a company whose main brand includes the words “United Colors”…

1986 – United Colors I

Having entered F1 in the early ’80s as a sponsor – hopping between Tyrrell, Alfa Romeo and Toleman between 1983 and 1985, Benetton turned their backing of the latter into full-on ownership as of the 1986 season. The writing had arguably been on the wall the year before, when the entire car was decked out in a quite fetching “United Colors” livery featuring assorted flags of the world – but rather than carry this through to their full-on ownership, the company came up with something else new for their first season as “Benetton Formula”.

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I’m quite fond of this car – I featured it in my top liveries of all time in a highly respectable twelfth place, commenting that the most striking aspect was the way the multi-coloured brush strokes conveyed a message of “speed”. I have to admit, though, that I greatly prefer it in the configuration pictured above to the times it raced with multi-coloured tyres…

1987-1990 – United Colors II

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The team decided to take the multi-coloured concept a different way from 1987 onwards – although it took a while for them to get the new concept, which would see them through the remainder of the years for which they were the primary sponsors of their own team, quite right. Certainly, the first attempt – at right – just doesn’t hit the mark. The main problem is that there’s one too many colours in there – and the other problem is that said colour too many is pink. Messing up the otherwise smart green nose section, the pink isn’t the only problem with this layout, which is a flawed execution of a neat idea, but it certainly doesn’t help.

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The pink was gone for 1988, and it’s an immediate and marked improvement. What’s more, the blocks of colour actually seem better-designed to fit the lines of a racing car. There’s also a better choice of shades at play, meaning the team can actually get away with having four main colours on the body of the car.

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The colours fit the lines of the 1989 car, too – but sadly, the car itself is such an utterly horrendous beast that it’s actually to the detriment of the livery. Suddenly the yellow section is flat and squashed, and the blue and red sections simply come up far too high. It’s odd how essentially the same livery can look so dramatically different on two different chassis – but undoubtedly, the B189 is an ugly machine (despite the addition of 7up as a perfectly harmonious sponsor addition on the rear wing).

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There were further changes for 1990 – the new airbox meant that the yellow section could be shifted upwards, and so the green could expand to the engine cover. This actually works a bit better – the red and blue go better into the green than they do the yellow – but what ruins this effort is an abundance of boxed sponsor logos that break up its lines. Particularly, having a green United Colors Of Benetton section on the engine cover just seems counter-intuitive – couldn’t space have been found for this somewhere among the green bits?

1991-1993 – Camel

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Having sat unobtrusively on the yellow sections of the previous few years’ cars, cigarette brand Camel took over as main sponsor of the team for 1991. Immediately, this was a much smarter car – red was gone from the paint job (now only appearing in sponsor decals), and Benetton’s own green was relegated to the nosecone with blue taking over as a secondary colour.

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Things got confusing in 1992, however, as the team ended up running two distinct paint jobs. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that they started the season running a modified version of the 1991 B191, before switching to the new B192 later in the year – but the other obvious reason for the change is the departure of Autopolis as a major sponsor. The owners of this racing circuit were on a publicity drive in their attempts to secure a contract for the Japanese GP – but evidently by 1992 these efforts had stalled somewhat. They were still able to afford a nose-cone sponsor’s contract, but their sidepod placement was hastily replaced by a couple of Benetton logos on a design that was otherwise almost identical to the previous year.

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By the time the B192 was successfully rolled out, the team’s owners had evidently decided to push their clothing brand back to the forefront of the operation – and so the new car also had a new livery, with the blue almost entirely replaced by green instead. The Benetton brand now occupied the entirety of the sidepod, and would continue to do so in the coming years – but this space would also be used to push other Benetton brands depending on the race venue, such as Prince (tennis equipment) and Nordica (skiing equipment).

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The ’93 livery was a simple evolution of the later-92 design, with the blue stripe on the nose now acting as a handy place for engine supplier Ford to grab a little extra branding in the now-complete absence of Autopolis. The only other major changes were the switch from Mobil 1 to Elf – represented, unfortunately, by an ugly box on the airbox that didn’t really fit in with the scheme – and the removal of Sanyo’s white tip from the rear endplates.

1994-1997 – Mild Seven I (Striped)

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There were much more significant changes to the livery for 1994, however, as the Americans of Camel were replaced with their Japanese competitors Mild Seven. At first glance the livery simply looks like it’s done a straight swapping of the yellow of Camel for the blue, turquoise and white of Mild Seven – but the pattern is subtly different, even though green remained the sidepod colour and Ford kept their blue nose stripe. What’s more, Benetton had decided to add a flourish of their own branding that would remain through all but the very last of their F1 cars – the four “United Colors” now adorned the top rear of the sidepods. The sidepod space, meanwhile, alternated between Benetton brands and other guest sponsors such as Minichamps and Bitburger.

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Despite being a bold new look, however, the 1994 car felt like a disappointing hodge-podge of concepts. The requirement to include three colours on behalf of their new sponsor, in addition to their own green, meant that at least one came off as superfluous. On the 1994 car it was probably the white – the green and blue actually went together quite nicely – but it would be Benetton’s own green (along with the dark blue of departed engine supplier Ford) that was sacrificed as the team went into 1995 as newly-crowned constructors champions Benetton-Renault. Here was a much slicker effort, borne of the team’s newfound confidence as champions – it felt much more like a specifically Mild Seven-branded car, and even the yellow sidepods couldn’t throw it off too much.

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The Schumacher era – and Benetton’s brief reign at the top of the sport – came to an end at the close of 1995, but the same basic colour scheme was kept for the 1996 season. The most notable difference was the sheer amount of white on the car – far more than at any other time since 1986. With Bitburger having followed their countryman out of the door, meanwhile, it was left to Benetton themselves to take over the sidepod again. For the first time, though, rather than being a rigid rectangle the sponsor’s box was allowed to fit to the sculpted line of those (really rather tiny) sidepods.

This still felt like a team slightly struggling for an identity following the departure of their talismen, though, and the combination of white bodywork, Mild Seven patches and Fondmetal on the rear wing made the car look surprisingly like a Tyrrell.

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Although an evolution of the design, the 1997 car was a significant improvement. For the first time it looked like the two-blue and white colour scheme had been built from the ground up, and everything fit significantly better with the lines of the car. The addition of red into the mix didn’t hurt, either – there for the sake of Kickers sponsorship, it was kept to specific, narrow areas, but looked smart rather than messy. Indeed, the more I look at this car, the more I wonder why it wasn’t in my top 25 list – especially as it coincides with the time that Benetton became “my” team to support.

1998-2001 – Mild Seven II (Solid)

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Change was afoot for 1998, though – and as young drivers Fisichella and Wurz replaced the old hands Alesi and Berger, and Renault made their (latest) departure from the sport, Mild Seven took over the new Benetton-Playlife car in its entirety for the first time. Gone were the compromising “stripes”, replaced by an almost entirely sky blue car with white sidepods. And it was utterly, utterly beautiful. My third-favourite F1 livery of all time, it helps that it adorned such a cute and tidy chassis design (albeit one that sadly didn’t go anywhere near as fast as everyone thought it would) – but it simply gets everything right. Multi-coloured sponsor logos (there’s red in Korean Air and Akai, orange in FedEx) are allowed to breathe on clean white space, separated by a classy, swooping section of Mild Seven’s darker blue from the sky blue that dominates the nose and monocoque. Even the race numbers are in a smart serif font. Elegant, beautiful and classic.

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It was inevitable, then, that the follow-up would be a disappointment. The ’99 car isn’t a bad design, by any means – it’s just got little detail changes here and there that don’t work quite as well as the previous version. At least the fundamental colour scheme remains in place, but it’s a shame to lose the red barge boards, replaced with trusty old Benetton green. And while the D2 logo works nicely on the rear wing endplate, it’s rather less so in a box that sticks out something rotten on the side of the nose. The biggest change, of course, was the deployment of the main Mild Seven logo on the engine cover – it was apparently part of a technique to enhance the logo at a distance and at speed on TV coverage, although it’s anyone’s guess as to whether it succeeded.

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There was a bit more of a change in 2000, as the new car did away with the white sidepods in favour of an all-over sky blue look. Even Mild Seven’s secondary darker blue was largely absent, appearing only on the barge boards. Sadly, the car lost something in the process – still relatively smart, the lack of any sort of lines on the paint job meant it lost the dynamism of the two that preceded it, and veered dangerously towards “pretty bland”. By this point, the team was actually owned by Renault – hence the fact that the car, upon its launch, featured absolutely no reference to the Benetton brand for the first time in the team’s existence (although small green United Colors boxes would be added once the car went racing).

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The scheme was definitely becoming tiresome by 2001, the team’s last in the sport. The logos of Vodafone, in their brief stopoff before pitching up at Ferrari, actually slotted in quite nicely (although they would have looked even better on the ’98 car), notwithstanding the continued insistence on a “patch” effect on the side of the nose; but the extra dark blue section housing the name of the returning fuel supplier Elf just felt like an unnecessary embellishment. By this point – perhaps understandably, as they were on their way out – there was a lack of imagination that suggested the team didn’t really care about their livery any more. Certainly, the cars were far from ugly – but neither were they particularly inspired. It was a far cry from the days of “United Colors” and painted tyres, and looking at the final Mild Seven car you could be forgiven for wondering why Renault hadn’t rebranded straight away in 2000, rather than carrying on with a name that was now almost entirely meaningless.

Of course, it was with the eventual rebranding that a bit of life was breathed into the Mild Seven colour scheme, courtesy of the addition of Renault’s own yellow – but that’s another story…

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Benetton were sponsored by Mild Seven for eight seasons from 1994 until 2001 (after which they became Renault), but with this one notable exception, never really made the best use of the colour scheme. The ’94-’97 cars were all quite messy affairs, with no clear identity; and the last couple of designs went too far the other way, the all-over light blue look coming off as somewhat bland and ugly. But in 1998, they got it absolutely spot on, with a fantastic effort. It was a time of optimism for the team – after a slow start, ’97 had eventually yielded their first win of the post-Schumacher era, they’d come third in the constructors’ championship, and Fisichella and Wurz seemed to be the best up-and-coming driver pairing out there. To fit Nick Wirth’s new, somewhat compact and clean B198, the striped livery of the previous few years was done away with, with Mild Seven’s corporate blue much more predominant, spread over the engine cover and nose. Separating it from the white of the sidepods, meanwhile, was the darker “secondary” blue, and this combination of shades was extremely aesthetically pleasing. Like a number of cars of its time, the fashion was for swooping, curved lines that gave a feeling of speed even when the car was stationary – and while this effect wasn’t quite as predominant as on, say, the silver McLaren, the patterning on the sidepods was nevertheless well thought out. This was also the last season in which the sponsor’s logo on the engine cover would be laid out in traditional strips – and it looked far better than the ugly, massive sloping white lettering of subsequent years. The other sponsors’ logos generally fitted in well with the scheme, as well – and as Korean Air, FedEx and Akai all made use of red in their logos, this added a nice offset to the main scheme without being as horrifically cluttered as the ’96 and ’97 cars had been. Indeed, while many of the liveries on this list are there for being clean and simple, I’m not sure there’s another one that combines so many sponsors and visual schemes and still manages to remain so. A neat and tidy livery, for a neat and tidy car. It’s just a shame that the expected success never came (the team slipped to fifth in the championship, and wouldn’t get higher than fourth until Renault and Fernando Alonso came along)…

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Benetton’s very first livery after buying out the Toleman team in 1986 would turn out to be one of their very best. It incorporated the “United Colors” far better than the multicoloured design of the few years that would follow, and integrated it well with the white sections in deference to engine supplier BMW. The brush-stroked nature of the colour flashes suggested “speed” in quite an effective way (few teams since have tried this tactic – the Lucky Strike version of the ’99 BAR is one example that comes to mind, although that was of course muted once they were forced to split it with the 555 livery) and managed to give a bit of grace and fluency to an otherwise uninspiring chassis model. The logo that the Benetton company were using in those days also has a certain retro charm to it – indeed, it’s not the last time we’ll see it grace a car in this list…

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