When Mercedes launched their car, most of the attention was on the shape of the thing rather than the livery – as the reigning (multiple) champions, how they’ve interpreted the new regulations is perhaps under more scrutiny than any other team; and what’s more, they’re just about the only team so far not to have one of those stupid shark fins/sails/flags/whatever you want to call it sticking out the back of the engine cover.

As for the livery, though, there have been tweaks from last year. Yet again they’ve made a slight change to the way the Petronas turqoise is applied to the car – it’s now in electric-looking strands that extend right the way along the side of the nose cone, and on to the front and rear wings. But they still haven’t made it so that the Petronas logo itself is completely backed by turquoise – it still runs partly onto the silver. So it still annoys my slightly pedantic tendencies.

Over at Ferrari, meanwhile, it’s perhaps not surprising that after a pretty unsuccessful season on the track, the team have ditched the white top half of the car and gone back to a red engine cover. However, the presence of that flipping shark fin means that there is an area of the car that gets painted white. It’ll be interesting to see, if the fins do end up being got rid of at some point, if the white moves onto the engine cover or is lost entirely.

Otherwise, we also now have white rear wing endplates (which, unless I’m mistaken, is for the first time ever?) and thin stripes along the side of the monocoque. To be honest, it’s all looking a little busy, and even though it’s basically just “a red car with some white bits”, the sheer number of logos the car has on it means that I think the team could do with having a bit of a rethink of how they work things at some point. It’s also kind of ironic that at a time when most teams don’t have many sponsors, Ferrari – the team who always got by without needing them so much back in the day – now have loads.

And then there’s Williams. Who… yeah.

Basically the same as last year – with the addition of JCB as a new sponsor on the rear wing plates – but like Ferrari (and unlike Force India) they’ve made use of the big old flat panel to extend the Martini branding. Which actually looks nice, notwithstanding the big horrible rectangle it’s printed on to. What I’d really like to see with Williams is the basic colour scheme kept (I really like how the blue sponsor logos look on the white), but just with the Martini stripes taking over more of the back of the car. Except not on a big shark fin.

Oh, and a bit of breaking (well, it was breaking a few hours ago) news – the Haas has been spotted out on track at a filming day:

Hmm. It could just be the light, but it appears they’ve simplified the livery to make it look like last year’s McLaren. Not sure if want. We’ll find out more tomorrow!

Now that we’ve had three years of it barely altering, it could maybe be about time for this to change up a bit. And it could still be argued that there were fan-created mock-ups in advance of its launch that were much more appealing than the real thing. But this is still the single most striking, classic and memorable livery of the current decade.

I’ve always maintained that I preferred the 2006 Williams, with its stronger shade of accenting turquoise, to the one that followed; but of late, I have to admit to changing my mind. Switching the nosecone to white really helps this livery, as does the addition of Lenovo as a major sponsor across all angles. If only that light blue were a bit darker and greener, it would basically be perfect. As it is, though, this one stands above the 2007 field a little better than the 2006 one (which really is harmed more and more by the clunky nose cone design the more I look at it) does; and for that reason, of this Williams era, it’s the one I’ve chosen.

This design changed so little between 2001 and 2005 (except for Compaq becoming HP) that you could pick it out for any of those years, but it was in 2004 – a relatively bland year generally – that it stood out best. And not just because of the “walrus nose”. While they could be criticised for not really changing it over that time, you can see why they stuck with it – it’s a really strong fusion of Williams blue and BMW’s blue-and-white, and the silver is a really nice touch. Most notably, it stuck to a rigid policy of not allowing additional sponsor colours, so it always remained blue and white.

I don’t like picking the same team for back-to-back years in this list – you’ll see elsewhere that I’ve tried to avoid it as much as possible. But Williams take it here, for the genuinely striking and memorable Rothmans livery. It was good in ’95 and ’96, too (less so in ’97), but in those years it’s up against stiffer competition. Here, although it’s indelibly associated with tragedy, it’s still the standout livery of the season. It’s also more cleanly defined in ’94 than in the years that followed, with the lines suiting the rounded car better than the more rectangular FW17 and FW18.

With the field thinned out somewhat for ’93, the classic Canon-and-Camel Williams is a more obvious winner this year. It’s a really effective combination of three different aesthetics – the yellow of Camel, Williams’ own blue and the white and red of Canon – that shouldn’t work but somehow does. You could split hairs over which of the ’92 or ’93 cars are the best, and maybe Mansell’s ’92 car is more iconic; but the ’93 one has Sonic the hedgehog’s feet on the monocoque, and that’s what does it for me.

First up it’s McLaren, who it’s fair to say we’ve given a significant amount of stick to for their liveries ever since their Vodafone deal ended. But this 2016 effort… well, it’s certainly the best they’ve had since the chrome job went away:

You still get the sense that Ron Dennis feels like livery designs and sponsorship are something that should happen to other teams, not his. But if we accept that we’re never going to get either a white/red Marlboro homage nor an orange McLaren ever again, then this is an ongoing team identity that’s much easier to get behind than the terribly bland silver and black that preceded it. Certainly, if they’d launched with this back at the start of 2014, I think we’d all have been a lot more favourable about it and them. Can they give us some more interesting team uniforms to go with it, though?

On to Mercedes, then, who unsurprisingly stick with the silver-with-black-and-turquoise that’s served them so well so far. Again, though, this might be the best implementation of it that they’ve yet had:

And finally, we come to Williams, who unsurprisingly have made basically no tweaks whatsoever to their 2015 livery, despite some minor changes in sponsorship placement:

 

And of course, we’ve had another team launch their car today… but we’ll have more on that one a bit later.

But what it omits, of course, are the liveries that have been designed since F1C launched. And so I thought it was about time to take stock of the last eight years of liveries, and come up with a list of my favourite ten since the site began. Once again, this is a strictly personal choice, and shouldn’t be taken as an attempt to come up with an authoritative “best” – and I welcome any and all debate in the comments!

10. Ferrari Marlboro (2007)

F1 Colours began just as the era of tobacco sponsorship in F1 was finally coming to an end – and some would say that this could be considered a contributing factor in the often unimaginative use of livery design in those years since. It’s hardly coincidence, either, that what I think is the best Ferrari of these years is indeed the last one to feature the Marlboro logo – although it only did so for a handful of races, as most circuits were in countries that had already banned cigarette advertising. While I still think Ferraris look best in a darker red and with black wings, I did prefer this striking all-red effort to the white-winged cars that have dominated in the years since.

9. Mercedes Petronas (2011)

Mercedes have never quite hit on a perfect version of their livery – every time they improve it in one area, it seems they mess up somewhere else – but I think the best attempt was their second one. Removing the black accents of the 2010 car in favour of increased turquoise for Petronas, it made the best of a combination of colours that shouldn’t really work, but somehow does. I still wish the turqoise patch covered the entire sidepod, but it’s a minor complaint. This, too, was a car that still had the classic ’50s-style white circles on which to put the race numbers – a baffling omission on the most recent cars.

8. Super Aguri (2008)

Ah, loveable Super Aguri. Their red and white colour schemes were functional throughout their short life, but they got better with each successive year – and their last car was definitely the best, introducing black as a strong third colour. It’s only a shame that it was only actually ever seen at four races, before the team’s sudden winding-up.

7. AT&T Williams (2007)

I was a big fan of the 2006 Williams – what can I say, I just like that blue-and-turquoise combo – and while the next year’s car wasn’t as good, it was still a lovely, neat and smart effort, and among the very best of the team’s post-BMW blue-and-white era. Although I’m still baffled as to why AT&T were kept on as title sponsor with such a small presence on the actual car itself…

6. Lotus Renault (2011)

Look, let’s not go into the politics of it all for now. I still think it’s mad that Renault chose to rebrand themselves in this way, particularly when there was another team using the Lotus name on the grid. And it still would have been a heck of a lot better without the red wing endplates. But there’s no denying that this car looked absolutely terrific on the track – which makes it all the more baffling that they continued to tinker with it in successive years, until by 2013 it barely resembled any kind of JPS homage.

5. HRT (2011)

Yes, it would have been much better if they’d actually managed to find sponsors to fill those “YOUR LOGO HERE” boxes. Running the whole season without doing so did make them look rather sad and pathetic. But with or without that unique marketing angle (truth be told, more with it than without it) this was a striking and memorable livery for a team that were badly in need of the kind of attention such a good design brings.

4. Virgin Racing (2010)

In any other year, the first Virgin (pre-Marussia) car would have been easily the best-looking on the grid. An excellent combination of red and black, with white trim, it looked like something Dennis the Menace would drive – well, with the exception of that floral pattern (maybe Walter the Softy got his hands on it). Successive Marussia cars weakened the overall look of the livery, but could never quite shake off the brilliance of the colour combination.

3. Martini Williams (2014)

I know that a lot of the love for the Martini Williams is more about what it represents than what it actually is. And I know that there are at least ten concept liveries made by fans that would have looked even better. But this is still a phenomenal livery, from a time when the sport really needed one. It’s a long time since Williams did anything that could be remotely construed as “flashy” – and this managed to do that while also showing an admirable amount of simple class and restraint. At the end of the day, it’s a car with proper racing stripes on it – how can you not love that?

2. Renault (2010)

Renault were a running joke on this site for the first few years I was running it, thanks to the spectacular awfulness of their ING-based liveries. So it was refreshing to see that not only did they pull an absolute humdinger out of the bag for 2010 – but that also, with the exception of those blasted Total wing bits, it was exactly the design everyone wanted them to. The effect was muted a little bit once HP were added to the engine cover and the bumblebee-esque stripes were hence phased out, but this was still an absolutely superb car. Indeed, I think a lot of my hostility towards the 2011 Renaultus is as much based on losing this after just one season as anything else.

1. Lotus Racing (2010)

Well, this can’t really be any kind of surprise to anyone who’s been reading the site for any length of time (and certainly not to those who saw my reaction to it when it first came out). Ignore the fact that they shouldn’t really have had the name. Ignore the fact that it now represents a rather sad, short-lived, ill-fated F1 enterprise that symbolised bad management and ended in ignominy. Ignore the fact that the car itself is a boxy, ugly shitbox that looks as slow as it actually turned out to be. And instead simply rejoice in the fact that it’s a metallic green car with a big yellow racing stripe down the nose. It’s not just the best livery that’s been announced since I was running the site – it’s one of the best since I’ve been watching F1 full stop.

The Martini branding on the engine cover has expanded in size, which is good as it reduces the amount of plain white on the car and strengthens the overall look. Rexona, meanwhile, join as a new major sponsor on the sidepod, having last been seen over at Lotus. And there’s a tweak to the presentation of the race numbers, too – they now seem to be in a fairly straightforward, uniform font as opposed to last year.

All in all: it’s the Martini Williams yet again, and that’s something to be happy about. As we await the Force India launch at 3pm today, the 2015 launch season has got off to a pleasant start.

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:

    

 

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!