Things are starting to spiral out of hand: McLaren, Sauber and Haas have opted for plenty of exposed carbon fibre construction and some colour liveries for the 2024 season that have already been released so far. The only thing to be thankful for is that Williams is quite liberal when it comes to their traditional blue hue design.
Before Alpine unveils their new car, we may have a certain amount of anticipation: since their "rebranding" in 2021, when Renault changed its name from Renault to Alpine, the team has been wearing this livery design: a metallic blue finish as the base color, with some seemingly incongruous pink, and some black and white accents.
However, the opposite is expected: Alpine's new car is also exposed with a lot of carbon fiber. We can only pray that we can spend a little bit of time in Bahrain, at least on the track to distinguish which car is which.
Annoyingly, if the meagre amount of paint on Alpine's A524 car could cover the entire car, the mix would be a striking sight.
It's the opposite, and it feels like the design department is running out of Dulux paint and can't afford to buy more because of budget constraints.
This year, Alpine also introduced a pink livery car to meet the needs of their title sponsor BWT, but the overall format is still exactly the same compared to their blue version, with a simple switch of main colors.
So far, we've released a few combinations of liveries: carbon with orange, carbon with green, carbon with white, carbon with blue and pink. Assuming that Mercedes' new car will also be painted in carbon fiber and cyan, then Red Bull's 19 consecutive years of "not forgetting its original intention" livery has suddenly become a rather attractive existence. In the same vein, we expect Ferrari, Aston Martin and the new Toro Rosso to make at least some effort on their liveries.
Jokes aside, it can be very difficult to identify the cars to some extent, especially for spectators in the stands. Maybe it's a little easier to tell the difference on a TV, as the camera is usually a frontal shot of a race car. But in an ideal world, or even a "slightly normal situation", it shouldn't be so difficult to tell the difference.
At Sauber's new car launch, they mentioned the prevalence of carbon fiber exposure, but that was before Alpine released the new car. At the time, we didn't even know anything about Alpine's choice to ditch their signature livery.
Arguably the most outrageous part? In contrast, Alpine's car at WEC was completely painted and looked pretty good – so any explanation would be a pale excuse and something had to change.
In football, there are rules in place to ensure that there are no 'shirts' between teams on the pitch – in the case of the Premier League, for example, the rules state: "In league matches, players from participating clubs are required to wear distinctly different and contrasting jerseys to ensure that the two teams can be clearly distinguished between the game**, the players, the spectators in front of the stadium and the television, including those with colour vision impairments." ”
For example, if Aston Villa play West Ham United, it is clear that both teams cannot play in both dark red and blue kits at the same time, and the visitors must choose their designated away kit instead. Throughout the history of football, this has been both a very clear rule and a common sense at the same time.
There are very few rules for car livery design in F1, and the only possible thing is to use different coloured T-frames to distinguish two different drivers from the same team. Historically, either the identity of the team itself is very clear, or the sponsor has invested a lot of money to paint the team's cars in a similar color to their own brand.
Only on rare occasions will the two teams occasionally appear in races with slightly similar color schemes, such as before 2017, when both Red Bull and Toro Rosso used similar patterns, but the differences between the two are still clear enough to identify which is Red Bull and which is Little Red Bull.
Between 2010 and 2014, McLaren and Mercedes both wore silver as the base colour, but there were also differences, as the colour and trim of their front wings were equally distinct enough to distinguish the two teams.
But in either case, there are only two teams at most that have similarities in liveries, and now we've got as many as four! This is an unprecedented situation.
The most outrageous thing is that we seem to have foreseen it at some point – since the secret of paint weight was revealed (the weight of the car is expected to increase by 5-6 kilograms with full car painting), the engineers of the F1 teams may have begun to question why they bothered to paint their cars. They could have saved a few kilograms and switched to using ballasts to adjust their weight.
While teams have begun to reduce paint usage to try to meet the minimum vehicle weight requirements set for 2022, there is little indication that they will bring the vibrant livery back to the car as the car continues to lose weight. Illusions with the team reverting to the colours of the cars have been shattered, and perhaps it's time for human intervention to be needed.
It may be one way to do this by specifying a minimum area for the car to be painted, but if a team's main colour is black or grey, they may still be able to use that colour in their livery, which is intended to discourage teams from "meeting only the bare minimum standard". From a marketing and audience perspective, it would be beneficial to ensure that all 10 teams in the paddock have a recognisable livery scheme, and perhaps a variation of the Premier League rules described above would meet this requirement.
After all, F1 is built on the brand and the visual spectacle it brings. Imagine having 20 cars on the track with carbon fibre undertones and only the most basic paint applied to them, which will greatly reduce the excitement of the spectators. In the 90s, the F1 race was a time when the teams were in full bloom, more colorful than the colorful images that filled children's TV shows at the time.
Now F1 has entered a new era, with colourful cars and décor replaced by monochromatic colours. There may be a tacit belief that no matter how beautiful the car is, it will not necessarily win the race. So why bother with this?
Sponsors may be a little bit mindful of this, but the vast majority of sponsors these days don't pay enough money to directly influence the design of the car livery, as long as their logo appears on the car – a simple white sticker on a black background.
But this is not the F1 era that I have experienced: at that time, the BAR team used to mix two different liveries, Sauber put together the logos of Red Bull and Petronas, even if the main colors of the two brands were not in harmony, or it was Bensen &Hedges who directly paid Jordan to paint the car to look like a hornet.
It was a time when teams wanted to create iconic features and stand out from the paddock, and now, teams are putting so little effort into the livery design that it even pushes the limits of "minimalism" and has nothing but "perfunctory". It's hard to imagine how surprising it would be if 20 years from now, any race car released so far would be able to sit alongside those sleek and classic liveries that once were.
This isn't just an expression of anger, and it's not about alpine at all, it's just a summary of what is happening in F1 todayThe team doesn't seem to care about the visuals, which is an important part of Formula 1.
It's great to see the cars fighting each other on the track, and that's what we're here for. But if we just see two grey cars attacking and defending each other, it seems like something is just lost. It's no longer the 50s of the 20th century, and we don't need to waste our 8K TVs to go to and from a so-called "monochrome F1 tournament".Racing cars should be the star and focus of the sport, not a half-finished carbon fibre sculpture that looks like it's only half painted.
The gradual flooding of the calendar with cookie-cutter street racing and the growing tendency for cars to be sloppy in their livery design make it feel like F1 is just going through the motions. F1, which is increasingly restricted, has a soulless feeling, stiff and sluggish, like a creeping "zombie".
We need that colourful F1 back.
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