We’re just weeks away from yet another new era of Formula 1. The annual tradition of teams unveiling their new cars is done and dusted and we’re now half way through pre-season testing at the usual location in Barcelona. Some fans regard this part of the year rather highly, with a sense of renewed optimism in the air as new liveries are uncovered with new and returning drivers alongside them.
For the 2017 season such optimism is rife within the paddock, with another host of new regulations set to make the cars look slightly different, along with Pirelli’s brand-new and much wider tyres. These alterations are expected to make the cars lap somewhere within the region of three to four seconds a lap quicker than last season, according to the FIA.
So when the first cars officially began to be unveiled, many fans eagerly scrutinised their shape and design in a bid to notice any major difference from what was witnessed last season. While the Williams displayed a contraption on the front of the car similar to that of the F-Duct, it wasn’t until the Sauber was unveiled that many fans suddenly dropped their jaws in amazement at the combination of a sexy looking car and a gorgeous livery.
Admittedly both the car and the livery look rather good, but the significant lack of sponsors on the new Sauber-C36 was the major feature that grabbed my attention. Admittedly several small sponsors adorn the front of the car, but the extensive void on the side of the car leaves little imagination to the seriousness of Sauber’s financial insecurities.
With Manor now officially off the grid for the 2017 season after entering administration at the start of the year, Sauber enter the new F1 season as the lowest ranked team on the grid. Despite spending the majority of 2016 behind Manor in the constructors’ championship, Felipe Nasr managed to score an imperative handful of points in Brazil to enable Sauber to end the season tenth in the championship and ahead of rivals Manor.
So with Sauber now the lowest ranked team in the sport, and already known to be struggling financially, surely a grotesque livery adorned with a ton of sponsors would have been far more favourable. After all we certainly don’t want to see a name as iconic as Sauber drop off the grid!
However when you look back at the liveries Sauber has produced in recent years, you have to go back to their BMW era to find a car with a sufficient amount of sponsors slapped across every nook and cranny. Nasr managed to bring some sponsorship money as a pay driver with Banco do Brasil, which in turn altered the livery to blue and yellow, but that still clearly wasn't enough to lift the team any further up the order.
Now let’s be fair to Sauber, they’re not alone in lacking sponsors. Just take a look at the 2016 McLaren livery, which consisted of lots of vacant space on the side of the car. It simply wasn’t something you’d expect from a team that only several years earlier were winning races and fighting the likes of Ferrari and Red Bull for the top honours.
It is the shape of the modern world of F1 that even teams that are synonymous with success can struggle to find sufficient sponsors, especially when you think back to the iconic liveries a team such as McLaren has had in recent years. Sponsors such has Marlboro and West created liveries that have become engrained in the memories of thousands, if not million, of fans across the world.
And of course it was those kind of sponsors that coined the idea of having a team’s livery dictated by a sponsor, with insane amounts of money being spent on completely changing entire liveries from one colour to another in a bid to keep the pennies flowing. Just think of Williams, who went to being sponsored by Rothmans with blue and white colours to being sponsored by Winfield with red and orange colours.
For some of the smaller teams such deals were their lifeline to remaining on the grid, with Gauloises sponsoring Ligier for many years before continuing their sponsorship of the team when they were acquired by Alain Prost in 1997. When you cast your eyes back through the 1996 season, Ferrari, Benetton, Williams, McLaren, Ligier, Jordan and Tyrrell all featured predominant tobacco sponsorships deals, which in turn greatly influenced their liveries.
Between 1996 and 2000 it can be argued that the F1 grid enjoyed a renaissance of liveries up and down the grid, with each team fielding an extremely iconic colour scheme due to the success of acquiring big names as their title sponsors. Admittedly these weren’t all tobacco-based, but each team had an identity which we still regard in a high esteem to this very day.
Take the 1999 season as a classic example, where almost every team featured an iconic livery that is remembered to this day. Naturally Ferrari were their traditional red, while McLaren were silver and black with sponsorship from tobacco company West.
Jordan had created their own iconic livery which is still looked back upon to this very day, despite the team leaving F1 after the 2005 season, with an all-yellow car including predominant sponsorship from Benson & Hedges. Benetton’s blue and white from the Michael Schumacher era had morphed into a gorgeous sky blue, which remained on the car until they were sold to engine supplier Renault.
Sauber probably had the most eye-catching livery of the era, with their long-standing partnership with Malaysian oil and gas giant Petronas creating a livery featuring a whole array of bright and vivd colours including blues and greens becoming a predominant part of the team until their BMW era later on.
But the iconic liveries didn’t stop there, with even the smaller and less funded teams featuring colour schemes and sponsors that even big teams like McLaren would today give their right hand for. Arrows had a black and orange livery not too dissimilar to the new McLaren livery, with Spanish global energy company Repsol plastered on the side of the car. As is well known the Arrows livery would become predominately orange the following season, with telecommunications giant Orange joining forces with the team to create a livery many still adore to this day.
You then had one of the sport’s newest additions, Stewart Racing, with an all-white livery which only featured the a tartan strip in honour of team owner Sir Jackie Stewart’s Scottish roots. Even a new team such as Stewart boasted sponsors from HSBC and Ford. Prost were a dark and almost seductive blend of blue/purple, with Playstation and Gauloises on their car.
Arguably Minardi’s livery couldn’t necessarily be regarded as iconic, however their blend of dark blue and silver was a simple progression from 1998’s purple and silver. Although the Italian minnows were regarded as the lowest in the pecking order, they still featured decent sponsorship that would’ve made HRT or Manor jealous, with telecommunications giant Telefonica and Italian alloy manufacturer Fondmetal featuring heavily.
That leaves us with the rookies for the 1999 season, BAR, a team born directly out of tobacco sponsorship. The abbreviation stood for British American Racing, a direct play on the name of owners and title sponsors British American Tobacco. The team made immediate headlines in the sport for two main reasons, they managed to lure 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve to the team, and they launched the team with two completely different liveries intended to be run on their two cars.
One car was painted red and white with sponsorship from Lucky Strike, with the second car featuring a striking blue and yellow livery and sponsored by BAT tobacco brand State Express 555, or simply 555. Immediately the FIA deemed the two liveries illegal, stating that a team must run both cars in liveries that are identical. Although BAR lodged a complaint with both the International Chamber of Commerce and the European Commission, the team eventually backed down and resorted to what many regard as an even more icons “zip” livery, with both one side of the car in the Lucky Strike livery and the other in the 555 livery, split down the middle by a zip.
When you consider the idea by BAR to run two separate liveries, it becomes abundantly clear that the sport missed a perfect opportunity to rewrite that regulations regarding liveries in F1 and allow an entirely new way of sponsorships in the sport. To some purists the idea of running two separate liveries may seem outrageous, but when you cast your eyes abroad it becomes abundantly clear that it is not as crazy as some may think!
Just look across the pond to the likes of IndyCar and NASCAR, where a team can run almost as many liveries as they can in one given season. Teams that run up to four cars can quite easily run four different liveries, which can grow in popularity as much as the likes of the Marlboro McLaren or Rothmans Williams.
So maybe adopting the right for F1 teams to run two different liveries is not a bad thing, as it could potentially offer teams with more flexibility to feature varying liveries in relation to the different markets the sport visits across the globe. Lets face it, tobacco sponsorship is certainly not going to make a comeback, no more so than gas-guzzling 3.0 litre V10 engines.
When looking closely at the liveries in IndyCar alone, it’s quite amazing to see the sheer flexibility of the liveries on show throughout the year. Take the Penske of Helio Castroneves, who ran a black and white livery with red trim for the majority of the season, sponsored mainly by Hitachi. However in Texas he competed in a blue and white car with a dash of red, as well as competing in the Indianapolis 500 with his iconic “yellow submarine” livery with red trim with sponsorship from Pennzoil.
However, some teams in IndyCar have managed to create iconic partnerships of their own, namely Chip Ganassi Racing which enjoyed a fruitful 27 years with American retailer Target. This partnership helped create a memorable red livery with white trim and the iconic Target logo adorning the car. Throughout this era both cars usually ran very similar liveries, with Scott Dixon, Dan Wheldon and Dario Franchitti enjoying tremendous success during this partnership.
However, there were moments when even this partnership made way for special liveries. Franchitti ran a black and yellow Nikon-branded livery during some races in 2010, and both Franchitti and Dixon ran blue Energizer-branded liveries on several occasions.
So maybe this form of relationship between liveries and sponsors could be the way ahead for F1 teams in the future, especially with the new era which we are on the eve of beginning? If you think about it, running two or more liveries a season could be extremely fruitful for some teams, as they could double or even triple the amount of sponsors across a season, with blue-chip races such as Monaco, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy and Singapore undoubtedly bound to bring in the sponsors willing to pay for a team to radically alter their livery for just one race.
However, each idea always has a con attached to it. Providing a team successfully manages to acquire multiple sponsors across one season and persuade them to pay enough to alter their livery entirely, what about the teams who at the moment are struggling to find enough sponsors to fill just one car and livery. Just take a look at the new Sauber and McLaren, both sporting rather eye-catching liveries but both very void of any significant sponsors with the side of their respective cars both extremely bare.
Sure adopting a “multiple livery” rule would benefit the big teams who would have the weight and power to pull in strong sponsorship deals, such as Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull, while the likes of Sauber, Haas and McLaren struggle to make even one livery full of sponsors.
It’s a double-edged sword and a conundrum which has plagued the sport since the banning of tobacco sponsorship. Admittedly big sponsors do still make an appearance in F1 from time to time, such as Petronas, Infiniti and Martini, the latter creating an iconic and nostalgic livery on the Williams. However, there is no denying that the tobacco-sponsored era created a special batch of liveries which will remain synonymous with the sport for decades to come.
Their void has never truly been replaced, and that fact has never been felt as strong as the current F1 era, with teams that boasted once groundbreaking liveries with multi-million or even multi-billion pound sponsors now looking bare and almost embarrassingly void of anything resembling a household brand.
