51: Keeping Up Appearances F1 style

James Allen On F1

This week James Allen delves into a topic that has always fascinated him - the way F1 teams and drivers present themselves – in other words their identity. The F1 season launch at the O2, London in February showed which teams had figured out their identity and those who hadn’t.
F1 teams go to endless lengths to refine the tiniest details on their car to gain performance, but could they be doing much more to make the cars and drivers look good to fans and sponsors?
Is an F1 car livery just a blank canvas to showcase a team’s sponsors, or should it say much more than that about the team?
How teams show up and what they stand for is really important. Think of the change McLaren went through when Zak Brown took over and switched to papaya orange or when Mercedes switched from Silver Arrows to black cars.
We explore this in the company of celebrated designer Nick Downes, who has been creating F1 car liveries and logos for over 30 years, including the iconic yellow “snake” livery for Jordan in the late 1990s, the Jaguars in the early 2000s and more recently for Williams.
Send your comments or questions to: @jamesallenonf1 on X or [email protected].
A Motorsport Studios production for Autosport