It’s a shame Ferrari’s special livery for its 1000th grand prix celebrations at Mugello isn’t going to be taking pride of place near the front of the field.
After Mercedes gave its cars a splash of white and brought a historical vibe to its team kit to celebrate 125 years of its motorsport programme at last year’s German Grand Prix, it planted a seed of hope in my mind that Ferrari might come up with something as well when it started shouting about its 1000th GP.
Running in the burgundy it used when it first appeared in the world championship in 1950 is a nice touch. It’s not going to change what will probably be another miserable weekend on home soil – but at least disappointment won’t be as much of a shock as Mercedes’ disastrous weekend in revised colours was last year.
But have two of F1’s biggest teams set a trend that should continue? We certainly don’t want F1 to head down the route of US racing, where some cars run in different colours almost every weekend, but allowing teams one ‘joker’ livery per season could create a chance to do something interesting, acknowledge an anniversary or pull a one-off sponsor-pleasing stunt.
‘Home race’ liveries would be the obvious one, although once you’ve seen Union Jack designs from McLaren and Williams, and a Haas decked out in stars and stripes at Austin, you’d hope teams would show more imagination. Haas, for example, has NASCAR sponsors and liveries it could look to use to generate more interest in its F1 team in America.
Could teams celebrate other anniversaries, such as McLaren running a red and white design at Suzuka or Interlagos to celebrate Ayrton Senna? Renault (or Alpine) could acknowledge its milestone first turbo F1 win when the timing was right (or just at the French Grand Prix), or Fernando Alonso’s blue and yellow title-winning colours for a one off, particularly once he’s back driving for Team Enstone next season.
Honda has what could be described as a corner of the AlphaTauri livery devoted to its red lettering on a white background this year. With its 500th race coming up next season, handing the team’s colours over entirely to Honda for that event would be a huge gesture to the Japanese manufacturer.
Not all teams have their own history, but some have heritage dating back to previous ownerships. To use the Enstone example again, how about an old Toleman or Benetton livery around the streets of Monaco one year? We’ve often seen special crash helmets for drivers, why not take it one step further, as long as it’s not over-done.
They don’t all have to be ‘old liveries’. That would become tired very quickly. As we saw with the black and gold Lotus colours coming back from 2011-15, the novelty wears off. So what else could teams do?
Sponsor-wise, quite often partners have to fall into line with an existing set of team colours. Perhaps if a one-off opportunity presented itself each season, teams would be willing to revise their livery for a particular market that’s important to a sponsor? Anything teams can do to offer more bang-for-buck is never a bad thing.
It would present an opportunity to support more good causes as well. We’ve seen one-off liveries from Red Bull in the past, most notably the white car David Coulthard used for his final race in 2008 supporting the Wings for Life charity.
Mercedes committed to a black car for the full season this year as part of a pledge to improve its commitment to diversity – perhaps more teams would be willing to give better exposure to causes they support if F1 enshrined a ‘joker’ livery in the rules and actively encouraged it, the way NASCAR does with its “throwback” weekends at Darlington.
The closest we’ve ever come to something like this was the rule in 2004 that allowed third cars running on a Friday to run in different colours, but only BAR-Honda really took advantage of that.
Maybe it wouldn’t be as special if it happened 10 times a season, and it would certainly need to be controlled and still require both cars from a team to run in the same colours. But could it be a fun idea to try? I reckon so.
