McLaren has unveiled their special Chrome British Grand Prix livery, but fans are disappointed. The design was promised to hark back to the McLaren livery used between 2006 and 2014, but rather than a pure chrome look, there’s a little too much papaya for fan’s tastes. But don’t be too harsh on McLaren because there’s a reason for this.
Our drivers. 🤍
— McLaren (@McLarenF1) July 3, 2023
Our chrome livery. 🧡#ChromeIsBack pic.twitter.com/OpQfP0goLl
“It’s no secret that racing fans love McLaren’s classic chrome livery,” said McLaren CEO Zak Brown.
“[Major sponsor] Google Chrome wanted to bring back elements of the iconic livery to celebrate our team’s history at the British Grand Prix, and we’re excited to be able to give our fans what they want.”
IT'S BACK!@GoogleChrome bringing chrome back to our #F1 car for the upcoming #BritishGP! #ChromeIsBack pic.twitter.com/dDWUgkfFdV
— McLaren (@McLarenF1) July 3, 2023
It seems that this isn’t what fans want as one reddit user put it, the livery “is not great; and it sucks to write that, I had high hopes for this.”
Not everyone was negative, one user wrote, “It’s not the best but to be completely honest I think I like it more than the regular season one. (Not that the bar was set high).”
Perhaps fans’ feelings can be summed up in the image below…
Why didn’t McLaren actually give the fans what they wanted? F1 regulations.
There are rules surrounding liveries and one of those is that only one major change to a livery is permitted in a season. McLaren already ran their triple-crown special livery at Monaco and Barcelona, so this new livery had to remain largely the same as their base livery.
“We want to keep our papaya identity,” said Brown. “It is very important to us to give a nod to the past but also very much look forward to the future.
“There’s only so many times you can change the livery so what we did in Monaco, you are only allowed to do a couple of times, and then to kind of have variations of your base scheme, you can do a bit more often.
“But I think rules aside, it was important to us to build our association with papaya, much like Ferrari is red and Mercedes has its colour identity, we have a lot of feedback from our fans that really like the papaya so that’s why we went with the combination.”
With that, we’ll leave you with this.
