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Many years ago, I saw a McLaren F1 in brown. Not a nice metallic orangey brown, you understand, but a dull almost earthy color.

The car, at that point, was the most expensive road car one could purchase. And its owner had decided, in their ultimate wisdom, to buy it and paint it in a color one usually tended to try and rid from the depths of one's toilet bowl.

The same sense of disappointment hit me this past week when I viewed the liveries of the 2017 F1 cars. All of that time and money, all of that care and attention spent, only to be bedecked in such dreadful color schemes.

You wouldn't have thought it hard to come up with something beautiful. Something interesting and visceral. And yet year upon year, Formula 1 proves itself to be woefully inept in the beauty stakes. Mercedes went for a take on its regular silver and black, its block turquoise being replaced by lines of green and blue which wouldn't have looked out of place on Jaguar's Formula E effort. Red Bull stuck with its classy matte navy blue. Renault plumped for a rather nice yellow and black beholden of its corporate colors.

The internet seemed to go nuts for Toro Rosso's royal blue, bright red and metallic silver (pictured). Praise was heaped upon Sauber and its 25th anniversary livery. Everyone loved Haas's tail fin.But nothing grabbed the imagination. Not really. Not if we're being honest.



McLaren had been promising orange for weeks. Nay, months. And yet what was launched was a Virgin/Marussia in an off red. How hard is it to make an orange car look the works? Even under Ron Dennis, the test spec MP4-20 had got it right. Plain papaya color scheme, black sponsors. As the old adage states, KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

The Toro Rosso is beautiful in real life. But while it magnificently runs in royal blue, its pilots' overalls remain in the navy of a prior era. Red stripes bedeck the Red Bull overalls, yet only do they appear on the Toro Rosso machine. There's no consistency. For heaven's sake has no one thought this through? Of course, this would require different departments to talk to one another and I think we all know how that story ends.

Force India looks again like an old McLaren, yet the individuality of its old Indian tricolor scheme would have set it apart from the bunch.

The astonishing thing is that, for all of the board meetings and corporate decision making, or perhaps because of it, we are once again robbed of a beautiful grid.



Fans, artists, took little time in making their own versions of prospective 2017 liveries. And for all I have seen on the internet, and I've seen most, the work of Tim Holmes, is to me by far the finest. Sean Bull's work has been consistently wonderful, but tends to focus on replicating past liveries on current cars. Tim, as an exception, works on creating contemporary liveries utilizing current sponsors and color schemes, and his work is glorious. His eye and his art lie in simplicity. His Force India effort (pictured), posted just four hours after the launch, shows what could have been.Tim is a man who reached global acclaim last year after numerous drivers retweeted his designs for cars based upon their helmet designs. In an era when even with the space freed up by the shark fins we are no closer to reaching individual car recognition, his concept has resonance.

The key lies in simplicity. In taking core elements and making them work.

All anyone wanted from the McLaren was an orange car. Something that harked back to the old days. To their history and their core. What we ended up with was Virgin/Marussia take two. A poor Arden F3000 paint job. How hard is it to paint a car orange and slap some stickers on it? Apparently, pretty hard.



I arrived in Barcelona on the last day of the first test. And the track was worryingly quiet.The issue was that the Thursday had been booked as a wet test. Hundreds of thousands of litres of water had been pumped onto the track to simulate wet conditions. But by the time testing began, the water had mostly dried up. Five laps at most on the full wet. Some never even ventured out until it was only wet enough for inters. As the sun came out, slicks were back in effect in little to no time.

And so to the afternoon. Again the bowsers came out. Again the track was drenched. Again it dried up in no time.

It was an abhorrent waste of time, effort, money and water.

Five hours down the road exists a circuit which could have done the job and played its part. Circuit Paul Ricard is known as HTTT, High Tech Test Track. Quite apart from the over 100 various layouts available on which to test racecars, it has in operation a total trackside system of sprinklers, which can recreate both a standing water situation and full rain scenario. And yet here we sat in Barcelona, with trucks dumping water on a track which was soon dry.

The teams like to test at Barcelona. They've been doing it for years. They have vast swathes of data on the place. But how does that help us as fans? How does that mix things up? How does it roll a dice of uncertainty when there exists reams of data against which to compare oneself? It doesn't. And so the status quo persists


What if we went somewhere different? What if we went somewhere with over 100 track layouts? What if we spent two days on a high-downforce layout, two days on a low-downforce layout and two days running wet weather testing, one day on each of those track formats? What would we learn? How much expectation would still exist in Australia?While it is always difficult to look at the numbers and gauge anything from testing, we already have an idea on a competitive order and time comparisons to last year. And so, a little bit of mystery has been taken away. Which is a shame.

The one thing that did receive something of a shake-up was an area ripe for reform. Liberty's first dictum was to allow teams to start posting videos to social media from testing. It appears some teams were aware in advance of the decision, bringing full crews and beginning their filming schedules the day before the email went out. Mercedes, by chance, had brought along the team responsible for documenting most of the behind the scenes content which surrounded Nico Rosberg in 2016, and they were immediately put to work.

It was a good first step and a great first look at how Liberty is already influencing the media landscape, and how things may change going forward. With tracks signing long-term extensions, Liberty seems to be moving fast to sure up the calendar too.

The cars look great, they're fast and an absolute handful. They will test the drivers and make them, in the words of the champion, gladiators once more.

So I can sit here and whinge about color schemes and the choice of testing location. But in reality I'm heartened that as of right now, they're pretty much the only things that don't seem to be heading in the right direction.

Originally appeared at

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