03/06/2024
NEWS STORY
In a bid to give all the teams their own individual visual identity, F1 bosses are seeking to impose rules on the liveries to be sported from next season.
Trust us, when going through the thumbnails of images whilst editing them for the various galleries, it is all too easy to confuse the Mercedes with the Aston Martin, the Williams with the RB.
Prior to 1968 it would have been much easier, for the cars all ran in the colours of their country, the Italians in red, the French in blue and the British in green.
Then came the season opener at Kyalami on 1 January 1968 when the Brabham of John Love appeared in the orange, brown and gold colours of Gunston cigarettes. Just a few weeks later the wraps were taken off the works Lotus 49B, which sported the colours of another cigarette brand, Gold Leaf.
The Gold Leaf sponsored car didn't take to the track until the Spanish Grand Prix in May, but just a month earlier the legendary Jim Clark had perished when he crashed at Hockenheim in his F2 Lotus which also sported the cigarette company's branding.
It wasn't long before all the cars were sporting liveries reflecting their sponsors, and while tobacco ruled there were some notable exceptions, not least the fabulous Yardley-BRMs, the STP March and Durex Surtees, to name but a few. The sport was never the same again.
However, as part of the drive to improve the experience for newfound fans and encourage them to identify with certain teams the sport is seeking to give each team its own identity, and while most might think that this was more dependent on the name, country of origin, drivers or history, in the eyes of F1 bosses a unique livery is the key.
The move is in its early stages and is sure to meet with resistance from teams eager to sign up major sponsors who will in turn be keen to show off their brand identity around the globe.
Further muddying the waters however is the fact that in recent years, in their determination to get down to the minimum weight, the teams have been leaving ever increasing areas of the car surfaces stripped down to the black carbon fibre.
As always in F1, it is a bit more complicated than maybe meets the eye," The FIA's head of single seater matters Nikolas Tombazis tells Motorsport.com.
"One issue is that cars have a bit too much naked carbon," he adds, "because obviously the weight of paint, so the cars have a bit too much black.
"There has also been a lot of work done by all teams to change the type of paint or indeed a lot of it nowadays is extremely thin films, to keep the weight as low as possible," he says.
"And another issue is that some teams seem to use similar colour schemes, so they end up with cars that maybe look visually quite close to each other. We're discussing it still with the teams, and it will be discussed in the next F1 Commission."
While the teams may well see eye-to-eye on a wide range of issues with F1, not least how to make more money and block Andretti, it is unlikely they will be happy if ordered to adhere to a livery policy.
However, F1 has a new ally on board in the shape of FIA President, Mohammed ben Sulayem, who, though late to the party, is now fully with the programme.
"We need to get to some process where teams in some way or other communicate with each other and say: 'Well, if your car is blue here, mine will not be blue there.' Or something like that," says Tombazis. "But how exactly that process would work remains to be seen. It's not a regulatory process.
"We don't want to be making regulations about liveries as the FIA, but we do want cars to be distinguishable," he adds.
As Liberty Media sets about getting involved in every aspect of the sport, with the FIA seemingly now fully on board, it isn't only the liveries on the cars that are being questioned, for F1 wants to make the drivers more identifiable in their identifiable cars.
"It used to be, of course, drivers had more recognisable helmets in the olden days because there were simpler designs," says Tombazis. And they were like that probably for the whole career.
"Now there is a change of regulations and they've got all these funny shades, plus you don't see the helmet anyway because of the halo. So we need to find some way to make people be able to know if it is Russell or Hamilton, but also to be able to easily distinguish the cars.
"It's not something we want to put in a regulation and then report somebody to the stewards because the colour we don't like," he insists. "We don't want to get into that. But we do want to get in a place where somehow teams see it as the common good that the cars can be recognisable."
Of course, the practice of adding labels above cars during TV coverage was one of the first steps in the new F1 for Dummies era, but now they want it even easier for those new fans to know who is who and what they are driving, as the powers-that-be seek to get involved in every little aspect of the sport.
F1 bosses watched as W Series disappeared without a trace then immediately went about introducing their own series, F1 Academy. The teams were brought on board in order to use their names (and liveries) so that female racers could join the bill, thereby cynically adding another dimension to the drive to make the sport more inclusive and welcoming of new fans.
Those who have lived through countless versions of the sport have dealt with changes to the regulations, point system, liveries, driver names just about everything, but suddenly the sport is being dumbed down beyond all recognition.
It would be nice to think that the teams might finally make a stand, but as they eye those record revenues that is increasingly unlikely.