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When Williams announced that it would be running a unique livery for its new car launch at Silverstone on Friday, it was assumed it would be something leftfield.
The team could have adopted a special Valentine’s effect for February 14, gone retro, or even opted for a full-on camo-type concept as McLaren did on Thursday.
Instead, the “bespoke one-off”’ colour scheme that Williams showed off was not a million miles off what we would expect its regular car to look like – especially given the presence of all the sponsor logos.
The trigger for such an approach is the restrictions laid down on teams revolving around F1’s season launch event at the O2 in London on February 18.
As part of a mandate laid down by Formula One Management to ensure that the O2 event has something unique to offer fans, teams have been asked to hold back on revealing their 2025 race liveries until the big event.
This has prompted headaches for some teams – especially those like McLaren and Williams that have chosen to get their cars running out on track beforehand.
While McLaren opted for its sponsor-free camouflage look in its regular papaya-and-black colours at its Silverstone launch, it was more of a quandary for Williams.
This was partly due to it having just announced a major new title sponsorship deal with Atlassian – which it obviously wanted to shout about at its sponsor and media event at Silverstone on Friday.
Not wanting to give away too much before the FW47 reveal, it had only been able to show off the Atlassian logos on the race suits of Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon until now.
But it knew it had to get the sponsor logos on its car for the launch event to keep its partners happy on a day the F1 world was watching, and it knew it had to do so while also fulfilling the requirements of not showing off its definitive livery. The result was the clever middle ground we saw.
It both is - in where the sponsor logos are - and isn’t - in the base colour design - the team’s 2025 look.
While it is understood that the sponsor stickers that adorn the car are in the same location that they will be for this season – especially those big Atlassian logos on the front and rear wings and engine cover – it is the base colour that is going to change.
At the Silverstone launch, the typical Williams blue and black was spread over the car in a stream of lines and blocks.
Up close it is easy to see how unique and complicated the launch livery is; but stand a distance away and the blues and blacks merge so it does not appear too dissimilar to what would be considered a typical Williams paint scheme.
Sources suggest that when its definitive livery is revealed at the O2 next week, the Williams will look very different – but like most things in F1, the devil may well be in the detail.
