1) Lotus's new leaf, 1968
While it would be wrong to suggest that Colin Chapman's decision to emblazon his Lotus 49s with sponsorship marked the start of sponsorship in motorsport (as this brilliant little piece points out, motorsport sponsorship was actually invented by some South African blokes), it did mark the introduction of sponsorship liveries in the F1 world. Prior to the red-and-gold Lotus cars merrily advising spectators to buy a particular brand of tobacco, F1 teams had run in the colours of their country of origin. A situation which produced some evocative-enough looking cars (the green-and-gold Lotuses, the scarlet Ferraris, the dark blue Eagles), but where the livery design was more circumstance than design. Trying to praise a pre-Gold Leaf livery would be like complimenting an A1GP team on painting their car like their national flag. That's just what they're supposed to do.
So 1968 is the start point for this list, and why not kick off with the livery that kicked off so many decades of sponsor-whoring, principle-destroying car painting. The shock value of Colin Chapman’s decision to charge money for the right to stick natty decals on his cars cannot really be underestimated. It was a new dawn in every sense of the word, with F1 opening itself up to the terrible joys of branded cars and uniforms well before other sports cottoned on to the idea.
And, despite the fact that we should probably hate it for setting in motion the end of every historic colour scheme that went before it, it was actually a very smart livery. Perhaps not quite as sexy as the JPS Specials that would come after it, but a design that was almost enough to make the late-60s era F1 car, with it's improbably-stupid wings, halfway-nice to look at. Which is an achievement that some of us can only dream of one day achieving.
2) McLaren's clockwork orange, 1997-2006
One thing that sponsorship in F1 often destroys is any sense of history within a team, with livery-based links to the past ignored in favour of colouring the cars any way the sponsors desire. After all, the most historic of F1 brand names, Ferrari, severed their links with the rosso corsa shade of red in 1996 to suit some bloody whim of some suit at Marlboro HQ for eff's sake!! And like many other teams, McLaren's current super-shiny horrorshow bears about as much resemblance to Bruce McLaren's original team as I bear a resemblance to a well-adjusted human being.
But sometimes, history wins out, hence the garish orange testing liveries employed by McLaren at random points between 1997 and 2006. True, the slightly naff reasoning behind the original test run was to confuse everyone watching prior to the launch of their new-for-1997 dull grey West livery after so many years running in Marlboro red-and-white, but it was also a tip of the hat to the original McLaren team, which ran in orange colours in the 1960s before the inevitable switch to corporate colours.
True, the orange scheme looked, at best, eye-wateringly awful, but it was at least a team reminding everyone of a more innocent age, and was a nice throwback to an earlier age of F1 which showed that for all the changes of ownership and tobacco money that had been thrown at the team throughout the years, there was still a vague sense of history in the team. The orange design lives on today in the Donington museum, which holds a test-liveried MP4/13 in it's imposing "hall of McLaren" either side of the 1997 and 1999 dullard grey cars. The briefest glimpse of fun in a sea of McLaren-branded automata.
3) Minardi's fluorescent monster, 2000
Formula One has witnessed many bizarre sights down the years, be it Giancarlo Fisichella's pole position in a Force India at Spa last season, Jacques Villeneuve adding the suffix "World Champion" to his business cards, or Jenson Button's ginger beard. But this particular Minardi car's time in the sun, when the farcically-bad Gaston Mazzacane held off Mika Hakkinen's McLaren for 3rd place for a series of laps in the middle of that year's US Grand Prix is up there with the best of them. It was confusing enough for Murray Walker to spend most of the time asking why the 'lapped' Mazzacane wasn't being blue flagged, no matter how many times Martin Brundle told him it was a fight for position.
It certainly wasn't hard to spot the fight, given the garish green Telefonica-inspired livery on display on Mazzacane's car. And the livery itself belied something else, that back then there was a real possibility of Minardi finally shedding their backmarking ways and becoming a serious team in their own right. The Telefonica money, which had come courtesy of Mazzacane, was beginning to spark mutterings of an uprising from F1's most hapless team. The neat, if slightly quirky-looking, chassis design was proving to be quick, with both Gene and Mazzacane failing to embarrass themselves, in qualifying in particular, despite the fact that the car was being powered by a hopeless two-year old rebadged Ford engine. Gene even outqualified Pedro Diniz, Johnny Herbert and Jenson Button in the first race of the year, and the two of them were far from the back-row certainties that many predicted. There were mutterings of an even better Gustav Brunner-designed chassis for 2001, and that the team might even be able to afford an up-to-date supply of Ford engines to boot, finally giving the tiny Italian team a competitive package to work with.
Alas, the age of the green Minardis flying up the grid from 2001 never came to light. Telefonica pulled their sponsorship, ironically as the newest Spanish F1 superstar-in-waiting, Fernando Alonso, joined the team for 2001, the team was sold off to the annoying dwarfish form of Paul Stoddart for the next season, and they remained cemented to the back of the grid all the way until the team's sale to Red Bull in 2006. Still, at least the last 'proper' Minardi car was a looker, managing to be both eye-wateringly garish and hugely professional at the same time. It was a livery that hinted at a bright future for the team, but in the end it was little more than a green flash in the pan.
4 Jordan's fizzy green looker, 1991
What makes a great livery is as subjective a debate as what makes a nice bagel. Depending on your viewpoint, a litany of meats, sauces, salads, toasting styles and other such details mean that there's no real way of being able to reach any sort of agreement. And, erm, you know, F1 liveries are similar. But if you wanted to reach any sort of consensus on what was "a good livery", then you couldn't do much more than offer the 1991 7UP-emblazoned Jordan-Ford as your example. This, perhaps more than any other F1 car decoration, is very much the smoked salmon and cream cheese of the livery world.
What perhaps helps the case of the '91 Jordan is that it was fundamentally a good-looking car anyway. Eddie Jordan and his merry band of sticker-makers could probably have painted the whole thing the colour of a particularly nasty bowel-movement, complete with half-digested chunks of unidentifiable kebab meat stuck around the airbox for good measure, and the Jordan-Ford 191 would still go down as being a bit of a looker, car-wise.
But the livery served to accentuate the attractiveness of the whole design, even if the placement of the dominant 7UP logo was a bit awkward. This was a complete approach to pleasing design. Not just the body, but the attire to go with it. This car was very much Nico Rosberg Angelina Jolie in a pair of Speedos cocktail dress. Alas, as is the way with commercial car decoration, it only lasted as long as 7UP's cash did, and from then on Jordan pulled out a shocking series of liveries, including this eye-hurting mess, and the gawky yellow era of Benson & Hedges.
5 Renault's 80's masterpiece, 1985
Never, perhaps in the history of design, has anything looked quite as "of it's time" than the final Renault F1 livery before their withdrawal from the sport at the end of 1985. I mean, just look at it. Has anything quite screamed 1980's louder than that cataclysm of prehistoric computer-aided design? It's got pinstripes, for crying out loud! The car number on the nose is written in a Casio watch-esque font, for christ's sake! You could only make it more 1980s if you draped Corey Feldman over the front of it and got the engine note to whistle a collection of Spandau Ballet numbers.
And yet, awful though that now might seem, in this ultra-cool, never-going-to-be-mocked-in-the-future era of skinny jeans, neon shades, indoor scarves and Gok Wan, it nevertheless manages to look like a Renault Formula One car. Without even trying. Compared to this shambles or this atrocity, that 1985 exercise in fleeting fashion looks mesmerisingly good.
It's odd to think that even in the 1980s, when sponsorship deals were booming, the Renault team could still hold onto a shred of corporate identity. Certainly, a lot better than they have recently. But it doesn't have to be like this, after all in 2007 Renault mocked up this masterpiece, ill-advisedly showing the world how good-looking they could make their cars if they weren't busily chasing the dollar of Mild Seven or Telefonica or ING or whoever. Maybe, with the sponsor-haemorrhage that proceeded from last year's Fixgate mess-up, they'll be free to return to something a bit less awful this season. If so, we can only pray that they include some pinstripes.
6 BAR's zipper, 1999
One thing you could never accuse the Craig Pollock-era British American Racing team of being was shy and retiring. "We believe the car can go and do good things and we aim to win races as soon as possible," was the confident battle cry from Pollock during the buildup to the BAR team's first season in 1999 having bought out Tyrrell the year before. And their approach to livery design was no different, launching their 1999 contender with a unique dual livery, with each of their two racing cars promoting an entirely different brand of cancer stick from the BAT portfolio.
It turned out that there was a reason such a move was unique, namely because it was against the rules. One-off unique liveries were nothing new, going back to Keke Rosberg's gold-and-white 'Marlboro Lights' McLaren, which looked spectacularly naff on TV, as if the car had been washed too many times and the colours had run out. But the general rule was that for the whole season, each team's car needed to be run in matching colours. A logical move designed both to make the grid look professional, and also to help spectators, no doubt, given how difficult it often is to follow the myriad colour schemes on display in the IndyCar series, where it is rare for any two cars to look alike. But a rule that BAR didn't particularly like having to stick to.
Their compromise to this rule was, predictably, a brash show of two-fingers to the FIA and their 'rulebook'. Both cars ran with a split livery down the centre of the car, with a zip painted on the nose for good measure. True, it looked absolutely awful, but in terms of a piece of anti-establishment rabble-rousing, it was a tremendous amount of fun. Like a massive season-long dirty protest racing around the track. Alas, for the team, their overly confident entry to the sport belied the fact that the car itself was a heap of nonsense, and they famously went their entire debut season without scoring a single championship point.
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