Trying to guess what a forthcoming livery will look like is a tricky game. F1 teams have a habit of confounding expectations and – more often than not – coming up with a far crapper design that you had pictured in your head when their entry/new sponsor/etc. was announced (I’m looking at you, Force India). But when Ford bought the Stewart team outright in 1999, and announced their intention to enter under the Jaguar name in 2000, every single F1 fan knew exactly what was coming – GREEN. Mockups were made by various people (including Autosport!) of the ’99 Stewart’s layout with a distinct shade of British Racing Green and the famous Jaguar “leaping cat” on the engine cover. Sure enough, upon its launch, the brand new Jaguar R1 turned out to be a marvellous fusion of Jaguar’s green and the white-and-red of the HSBC-sponsored Stewart. The shade of green wasn’t exactly BRG, but it was optimised for television lenses and was beautifully glistening. Complete with the sharp, aesthetically-pleasing lines of the car (still at that point an evolution of the highly successful ’99 Stewart), this was a design that was almost destined to look brilliant by default before the details were even figured out. Speaking of the details, there were neat little touches all over – I’m particularly fond of the gold wheels, which could have come off as tacky, but which offset the body livery superbly. Wisely, the sponsor logos on the green parts are all kept white – with black and red the only colours on the white sections. Jaguar remained in F1 for five years, over which time the livery stayed largely the same – although a handful of changes were made which meant that it never looked quite as classy as in that first season – using Becks’ full logo on the barge board, for example, while the colours still matched the main scheme, looked a bit too much; and a heinous mistake was made in 2002 when the blue of sponsors EDS and AT&T was added, making the car look somewhat messy. Still, though, despite the fact that the team’s performance never lived up to the original rebranding effort and the famous history of the marque, this livery remains an instantly recognisable and beloved one. Since Red Bull took over the team in 2005, meanwhile, we haven’t seen a single green car on an F1 grid – and that really is a shame.