While a nice jazzy design is all well and good, sometimes I’m just a sucker for simplicity – if it’s done with class, and if the predominant colour is aesthetically pleasing. So I make no apologies for having this one so high in the list, particularly when you consider (and if you’ve been paying attention so far, you should know this) how much I like green F1 cars. There’s just something about this Tyrrell – from the brief period in which Benetton were just sponsoring F1 teams, rather than outright owning them – that ticks all the boxes for me. The Benetton logo of the era, as I mentioned when discussing their own 1986 car, oozes retro charm, but it’s the shade of green that really makes this – it looks fantastic. It’s also rare to see a car that mixes green with black – as opposed to the more common white or yellow – and while you suspect this is largely down to practical chassis-based considerations, the way in which it cuts diagonally down the flanks shows that some thought has been put into it. The little yellow flash on the nose, meanwhile, shouldn’t work, but kinda does. Oh, and – of course – something else the avid reader should be aware of: check out the huge race numbers (which get bonus points for being the traditional Tyrrell 3 and 4) on both the nose and flanks. It’s a shame the linkup lasted only a year – Benetton were already sniffing around other teams – and the purists may sniff at the colour scheme (given that a Tyrrell really shouldn’t be anything other than blue or white)… but you can’t deny how smart the whole shebang is.

We start the countdown, then, with number 25…

The once-great Tyrrell team had been in the grip of a sad decline for a good few years by 1996, and the sparse, almost entirely sponsor-free white livery they’d begun to use (aside from a flirtation with Nokia and blue in ’95) was indicative of that. Despite this, they managed to come up with a very neat little design in ’96 – and, ironically, successfully incorporated Mild Seven branding (a non-title deal, only present because of driver Ukyo Katayama) into their car in a way that Benetton, who had them as title sponsors, would very rarely manage throughout the nineties. A definite case of “less is more”, the blue flourishes manage to lift the otherwise plain car away from the “we’ve got no money” look.