Caterham – F1 Colours

Fantasy 2015 Liveries Are A Big Thing Right Now And We Love Them

Seb Patrick — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 20:13:46 +0000

Perhaps it’s the fact that 2014 didn’t see too many in the way of drastic changes to the previous year’s liveries – or perhaps it’s just that we expect that 2015 may see a radically different style grid for more reasons than one – but whatever the rationale, it seems that there’s a growing trend among fantasy F1 livery designers to already be looking forwards to next year, and styling possible future cars.

In some cases, there’s a desire to genuinely predict how things like the McLaren Honda might look – but in others, it’s simply a case of mixing up the established designs to come up with something fresh. Either way, two designers in particular have given us a deluge of absolutely gorgeous possible or alternate designs in recent weeks, so naturally we thought we’d take a look at them all.

First up we have Tim Holmes, who’s been posting his designs on his Facebook page, and has recently been spotlighted by the top blog WTF1. Tim has, like many people, been speculating on the 2015 McLaren, and his three designs are significantly different from one-another. They all include silver, but one (comfortably my favourite) is an obvious Marlboro homage, another makes use of classic McLaren orange, and the third is a somewhat more out-there heavily blue effort:

Among his other designs, we have some of the cars being just slightly tweaked, such as the Mercedes, Williams and Ferrari:

His Red Bull, meanwhile, makes use of a “can”-styled concept that many of us have wanted to see on the car for years:

The Marussia and Sauber are both welcome reinventions – in particular, I’ve long wanted to see Marussia move away from the red/white/black of their current scheme:

More dramatic are the Caterham and Lotus. I’m not entirely sure that all the colours work well together on the Caterham, but I absolutely love the Lotus – it’s possibly my favourite of his. It’s about time, in my opinion, the team moved away from the JPS-inspired design – and this livery manages to homage both another classic Lotus livery (the yellow Camel) and the team’s prior history as Renault. Brilliant:

Finally, Tim has also knocked up a concept Brabham team, inspired by the recent crowdfunding project to get a Brabham team of some kind back into open-wheeled racing:

Not to be outdone, designer Camille de Bastani – whose work we’ve enjoyed immensely and featured on the site before – has also knocked up a few potential 2015 efforts. Camille has been trying out various different McLaren concepts for a while, some of them along similar lines to Tim’s:

Camille also offers some stylish twists on the existing Ferrari, Mercedes, Sauber and Williams – and, again, goes with a red/white/blue for the Marussia. Seriously, guys, are you paying attention? THIS IS WHAT WE WANT!

But the absolute best in this batch of Camille designs, I think, is his Red Bull:

It’s the first time I’ve seen an alternative Red Bull design that I love that isn’t based on the colours of the can. Somehow, it manages to be based on the existing styling of the car, but just… absolutely loads better (with absolutely no spray paint in sight). Superb work.

Check out more of Tim and Camille’s terrific work at their websites. And if you’ve seen any other fantasy 2015 liveries (or indeed made any yourself) that you think we should feature, get in touch!

Make Your Minds Up, Caterham!

Seb Patrick — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:26:17 +0000

We didn’t actually get around to reporting on the livery that Caterham rolled their CT05 out in at the first round of winter testing. Which is probably a good job, as it turns out it’s not the livery they’re going to race in. We then didn’t actually get around to reporting on the second livery that they rolled the CT05 out in later on in testing. Which is also probably a good job, as it turns out that’s also not the livery they’re going to race in. But let’s have a look at the various paint jobs anyway, even though the colour scheme is really the last thing anyone’s been paying attention to on this particular car…

When the car first hit the track, it was in a rather simplified version of their previous livery. Gone were all traces of yellow that lingered from their Team Lotus days, and what was left was a straightforward, but very smart, design. The metallic green was actually offset quite well by the simple white lettering and the black front and rear wings – with the whole thing coming off rather like the 1983 Tyrrell of which I’m so fond. It was perhaps a little on the unexciting side, but a reasonably nice effort nevertheless.

However, Caterham decided to tamper with the livery after this initial unveiling, losing the black wings and white lettering in favour of a silver accent to the car instead. In some areas, this was an improvement – the rear wing looked terrific – but on the main green sections of the car the various sponsor logos suddenly became a lot less readable. And the lighter-green stripe along the sidepod just looked awful – like someone had accidentally left a bit of duct tape on the car before pushing it out of the garage.

Happily, despite being the “officially” unveiled car, it looks like this livery won’t be the one that takes to the track in Australia – as the team have now updated their Facebook page with an image of a third design. We’ll examine this in more detail when we’re given a closer look, but it appears that the amount of white (or possibly silver, it’s hard to tell from this distance) on the monocoque and nose has been increased, while there’s now a third shade of accenting green involved. And, perhaps most notably, the… uh… protuberance on the nose has now been painted black, to make it look less obvious. Although all that really serves to do is make the car look like it has a really, really short nose.

It’s a shame that Caterham have been so indecisive in their livery design, however – they came into the sport with one of the best-looking cars in many a long year, but it’s been gradually downhill since then. A green car shouldn’t be hard to get right, and some combination of the best bits of the two testing liveries should really serve them fine. The third design, however, is starting to look worryingly like a GP2 car – which, by all accounts, might actually be their performance level this year…

Caterham, Marussia and Williams (sort of) round off 2013 launches

Seb Patrick — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 22:34:03 +0000

And almost as quickly as it began, the 2013 launch season is over. That’s what happens, I guess, when the number of teams is reduced, AND when half of them choose to “launch” by rolling out their new cars amid little fanfare on the same test day.

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.

The yellow stripe visible in profile is still a bit of a misstep, primarily because it’s now the only such area on the car. Instead, a dark grey has been introduced to the front and rear wings – which actually looks kind of great. Suddenly the car’s quite reminiscent of an ’80s or early ’90s livery – a feeling that’s only enhanced by looking at it from the front on, where there’s no yellow visible at all, and in fact it winds up looking somewhat like the marvellous 1983 Benetton Tyrrell.

But it’s odd that after seemingly making a conscious effort to move away from the “Lotus” design – the shade of green appears to have changed a bit, too – they’d keep that last remnant of it. Ditching yellow from the livery altogether would, I think, have been a more positive statement. Although, that said: that Tyrrell I like so much had a tiny amount of yellow on it, too.

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.

Losing sponsors – including former team namers Virgin – has undoubtedly harmed the team, and they now feel like an outfit severely lacking in identity. The 2013 paint job certainly isn’t horrible – but neither is it in any way dramatic or inspiring. Maybe it’s that the colours are a bit washed out, but more than anything, it reminds me of the 2006 Midland. And that’s not a good thing.

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:

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…

2012 Begins! Caterham Pics Leaked

Seb Patrick — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:32:57 +0000

Well, we were expecting the car launch season to kick off tomorrow… but then, twenty-four hours ahead of the scheduled launch date of the 2012 Caterham car, F1 Racing magazine and the Caterham Facebook page decided to jump the gun. So here we are…

I suppose I’m fortunate that, as a liveries blog, I only have to talk about the paint job and not the shape of the thing, because… well. Wow. Certainly, it’s not that lovely shade of green, held over from the Team Lotus days, that everyone else is going to be discussing.

Anyway, as for the livery, it’s just about as expected – arguably, even something of an anticlimax given that the changes between 2010 and 2011 were more significant than the ones between this and last year. The design is almost exactly how the car lined up at the end of last season – the only major differences being that the sidepods are now blank (that ugly swooping CATERHAM text ditched, in favour of the team’s new logo sitting on the side of the monocoque), an adjustment to the arrangement of logos on the nose stripe (note that the Renault diamond now sits on the yellow stripe rather than in a box of its own), and the angling/recolouring of the side-on race numbers.

Oh, and it’s got a Queens Park Rangers FC badge on it. Which is just weird. I know the reasons why (they’re now owned by Tony Fernandes, if you didn’t know), but it’s still weird.

Anyway, there you have it. Clearer official pictures will no doubt be on the way tomorrow, but it’s clear they won’t be hiding much of a surprise.