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F1 2024's latest disappointing livery shows trend that needs to change

OPINION: A desire to save weight has been evidenced in 2024's Formula 1 crop by a proliferation of sparsely-painted liveries, with Alpine the latest team to reveal a colour scheme showing plenty of bare carbon. Aside from creating difficulties in telling them apart, the current trend points to an apathy for their spectacle as moving pieces of artwork

Author Jake Boxall-Legge

Published Feb 7, 2024, 3:01 PM

This is getting out of hand: now there are four of them. Amid the disappointment of Formula 1's 2024 launch season so far, three cars (ish) and five liveries have been unveiled. Of those liveries, McLaren, Sauber, and Haas had all opted for a bare carbon-plus-colour finish, as Williams (perhaps having felt guilty for starting the trend in 2022) has thankfully been appropriately liberal with the use of blue tones in its 2024 aesthetic.

Amid this growing plague of minimal effort being applied to the car's paintwork, "artwork" somewhat adjacent to Barry Flanagan's ringn ’66 on display at the Tate Modern (which is quite literally just a pile of sand), we perhaps expected some degree of predictability from Alpine. After all, since the Renault team's 2021 rebrand, we've come to expect the same thing: metallic blue finish, bits of incongruous pink, some black and white trim here and there. Instead, the nudus carbonus pox has afflicted Enstone too, ensuring that we're all going to have a jolly old time in Bahrain working out which car is which.

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Jake Boxall-Legge

Author Jake Boxall-Legge

Jake Boxall-Legge Autosport’s Technical Editor. Having studied Automotive Engineering with Motorsport at the University of Hertfordshire, West Country-born Jake's original ambition was to design racing cars. During a year between studies in which he accidentally rekindled a love of writing, he took up a Master's in Motorsport Engineering at Oxford Brookes. Halfway through his master's year, he was offered a place on the Autosport Academy, conducting occasional freelance duties before becoming the press officer for Formula 2 and GP3 in 2018. Autosport offered him a return to the fold later that year to serve as its Technical Editor. His voice appears on a number of videos and podcasts, and can often be found writing about terrible Formula 1 cars in excruciating detail. In his spare time, Jake enjoys baking and blames his failure to make it past the Great British Bake-Off interviews on his tenuous grasp on choux pastry. His dream is to open a brunch cafe - and his willingness to make outrageous puns in inappropriate situations has earned him the contempt of his colleagues.

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