This time last year, displaying a typical lack of originality, we ran down six of the best F1 liveries during the pre-season. And so to avoid repeating oursevles, this year we'll be trawling through six eyeball-hurting faux pas of livery design that today's bunch of teams may well do well to avoid copying.
As with last year's 'Best' list, we've avoided pointing out any pre-sponsorship liveries, which were dictated by racing colours rather than anything else and really weren't the fault of anyone. We've also tried to focus on the truly bad liveries, rather than just the boring. So no Toyota, then. And if you agree or disagree with the final selections, then feel free to leave your rant below.
As a man excusing his efforts after he had attempted to re-wire a plug, make an omelette and beat his high score on Angry Birds all at the same time might tell you as he stood outside his house watching it burn after he spilled raw egg onto a badly-soldered plug when tilting his iPhone too far, it is never a good thing to try and do too many things at once. But if that analogy was torturous, then it still had nothing on the tortured final design of the 2008 Renault, which appeared to be trying to accomplish several different looks all at the same time. And failing at all of them.
Trying to appease several disparate sponsors with vastly different clashing corporate colours, as well as half-heartedly attempting to keep some semblance of the original Renault yellow-n-black-n-white racing colours going as they did so, the Regie ended up with a livery so dreadful as to make small children weep. The ING orange, the Renault yellow, the totally unnecessary deep blue wings, the whole thing was a desperate, confused, explosion-in-a-tasteless-paint-factory mess of a design. Indeed the most distasteful part of the whole Fixgate fiasco, that blew up around the actions of Renault during the 2008 campaign, was that we were subject to a series of brand new photos of the R28 with the torrent of news stories covering the whole affair. If only they'd fixed a race in an attractive car, maybe we'd all have been a bit more sympathetic.
Some may say that they managed to commit even further atrocities against people with the power of sight with their 2009 machine, but despite the even brighter and more garish colours of the R29, the livery itself actually meshed together better than the hodgepodge 2008 effort, and it was the look of the car itself in 2009 with the newly mandated godawful wings that actually made that so difficult to look at. Still, it wasn't pretty, so thank the lord for the 2010 'bumblebee' design, and thank him (or her, or it) further for the only-slightly-ruined-by-silly-red-endplates new Lotus The Second livery for 2011.
As a rule, I do hate to bang on about things too much (honest), but despite having already dedicated the thick end of 1000 words to the travesty that is modern-day Ferrari liveries, it is probably worth, for reasons of both decency and laziness, revisiting that particular gripe. Marlboro Red, I ask you. Marlboro Red, for pity's sake. Marlboro Red.
Yes, the 1996 Ferrari was the end of the old rosso corsa days, and the beginning of the era of Ferrari cars being painted entirely the wrong colour. And it was, by a long stretch, a nasty horrible thing to look at. In some photos, it's only a couple of shades of Dulux away from being pink, for crying out loud. After the switch to a more tobacco company-pleasing shade of a livery design that had once had something to do with the Italian marque's long history, the only way was down. Sure, throw on some Tic-Tac stickers, go on, paint the whole rear wing white because a bank asks you to, why not just take some of your old car designs and retrospectively stick Santander logos all over it just for a laugh?
The 1996 Ferrari is a hideous livery for many reasons, but mainly for what it stands for. This was the final admission from Formula One that it was now an expensive marketing exercise firstly, and a sport secondly. This was, for a younger and less coal-hearted version of The Head, the end of the age of innocence. This was literally the worst thing that has ever happened in the entire history of human civilisation. But as I say, I don't like to bang on about it.
The problem with being a Formula One backmarker is, of course, that the ragtag bunch of sponsors you end up collecting leaves you without the opportunity to sort out a coherent livery design. Witness some of the dreadful efforts Minardi were churning out towards the end of their life, almost as if they'd just rolled out a plain black car before the start of the season and invited some autistic schoolchildren to decorate the rest of it with crayons.
And as it was for Minardi, and so many other backmarking teams, so it was for this dreadful effort from Footwork (neé Arrows) back in 1994. Looking like a mad fusion between early ClipArt technology and a high school graphic design project, the FA15 was the sort of thing that probably seemed quite cutting edge at the time, but has failed to stand up to historical scrutiny in the same way that shellsuits, prawn cocktail as a legitimate starter for a dinner party and Hoopers Hooch have. It had a picture of a duck on the engine cover, for crying out loud.
Thankfully for the team's credibility, though, they were just a couple of years away from reverting to the Arrows name and producing this splendid livery which was very close to making last years 'Best Livery' SOTB. Until I got drunk and forgot about it.
4) 1983 ATS D6
Any fashion designer, interior decorator, or creepy androgynous stalker of slightly chubby women will tell you that there is a simple rule for choosing your outfits: some colours go together, and some just clash badly, darling. While there's no doubt that this particular ATS combo of brown and slightly off-yellow were probably more complimentary than clashing, though, that doesn't mean that it was in any way an eye-pleasing livery.
Essentially, it was a brown F1 car. A brown F1 car. That special sort of brown that had become synonymous with drab, velour-interiored and poorly-built early 1980s road cars. While you look at a Ferrari F1 car and immediately think of this sort of thing, the D6 conjured up some slightly less impressive mental images of this.
Thankfully, fans got little chance to see the ATS Allegro in action, as the sole entry for Manfred Winkelhock struggled to put in much mileage. The German driver finished just three of the 15 races throughout the 1983 season. Though having said that, the team painted their 1984 contender with another tin of British Leyland Special, ensuring another twelve months of eyeball-averting before the whole operation folded at the end of the year.
Clearly the downside of running essentially the same livery for year after year is that when you inevitably have to switch to a new design to appease new sponsors, the reaction is almost certain to initially be a negative one. Like doggedly sticking with the same haircut for most of your adult life before suddenly deciding to go for a geek pie, the reaction is always likely to be one of shock rather than recognition. But just because people will always fear and distrust change, doesn't necessarily meant that the negative reaction isn't sometimes fully justified.
In 1998, after so long being associated with a predominantly blue-and-white livery courtesy of the likes of Canon, Camel and latterly Rothmans, all of which were by and large attractive designs (even if the 1997 version was a bit of a mess), the decision was made in 1998 to switch from one British American Tobacco product to another. And the result was this hideous Winfield-inspired disaster. Fortunately for discerning F1 fans, the switch to Winfield coincided with the team's mini-stumble into uncompetitive midfield strife following the withdrawal of the works Renault engine supplier, and the amount of time TV cameras focused on the Williams cars was greatly reduced.
By 2000, the team managed to roll out the much-underrated FW21 design, which was somehow able to look chaotic yet structured all at the same time (the F1 livery equivalent of a Mandlebrot Set), but the FW20 was nothing like that. Note to future livery designers: If you're going to put out an all-red car on a grid that already contains Ferrari (even if the Ferraris are the wrong sodding colour), it had better be a bloody good design. Alternatively, just copy the 1993 Dallara.
As we have seen, some liveries are awful for simple aesthetic reasons, while others are similarly awful for deeper, less obvious reasons that permeate into your very soul rather than just your corneas. And others, like this example of the never-remembered March 811 car, are awful simply because they smack so badly of a straightforward wasted opportunity.
The corporate colours of some companies just look like they should work as a sporting colour scheme, and Irish stout-chugging gadabouts Guinness are a perfect example of that. The combination of black, white and gold would, you expect, allow for a truly wondrous paint job even given the slightly anonymous nature of the car it was draped across. Being a naff car with a big money sponsor didn't stop the 2000 Minardi or the 2001 Arrows from being delicious to look at. But March rather messed up given the Guinness brand, with the famous logo awkwardly squeezed in amongst a cavalcade of other logos and doodles, capped off with an awkward cyan swish on the sidepod. All in all, it was a good day for missed opportunities.
Still, it could probably have been a worse use of Guinness sponsorship money. It could have been this, for example.
Trackback(0)
TrackBack URI for this entryComments (2)
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Write comment
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
