The way to solve Formula 1's livery tedium

Great expectations can breed great disappointments and Formula 1's launch season tends to lure fans into that very trap each year. The excitement of new cars and new designs remains undimmed as the insanity of expecting something shocking when teams are universally conservative takes hold.

Seeing the new challengers get unveiled is such an intriguing part of the season, even for years like this when a stable ruleset means the fundamental look of the cars stays the same. Yet F1 teams fail to deliver time and time again.

Last year had a couple of nice surprises: Toro Rosso's blue 2017 car looked seriously good when it broke cover with silver flashes on it, and Force India turned heads by ditching its first livery for its sponsor BWT's all-pink design. This year, Red Bull's special camouflage launch livery has guaranteed it plenty of editorial real estate.

But these are really exceptions to the rule. The big talking point ahead of the 2017 launches was the return of orange McLarens, but that turned out half-baked. This time the big disappointment is Alfa Romeo's return to F1 with a Sauber tie-up has led to an extremely bland white livery with Alfa branding on a red engine cover.

Is this really the best F1 can do? Even ignoring red herrings like the myriad concept liveries professional designers like to flood their social media channels with, surely not. The realities of F1 branding mean those concepts are unlikely to ever see the light of day, but there must be a middle ground between such bold ideas and the perfectly fine (but nothing more) offerings that end up being used.

To be fair to those creating the look of cars that end up being a bit same-old, same-old, it's not exactly their fault. The FIA might not enforce the use of national colours on grand prix cars anymore, but the need for teams to reflect corporate identities means precious little flexibility.

"This approach has generated controversy. It's difficult to understand why. It certainly doesn't detract from the overall show. If anything, it enhances it" BAT's Tom Moser on the 1999 BAR split-livery row

There are good reasons for this, chiefly the enormous investment made by sponsors and corporate boards. As 2018 shows, a Ferrari or a Mercedes or a Renault can have a smart livery (if nothing outstanding) when some independent teams seem to struggle for inspiration. But when a giant like McLaren, which looks good in papaya orange again, is struggling for sponsorship, surely opening up how the teams' 200mph billboards can be used is a no-brainer?

There is flexibility in the regulations, but nobody seems to want to see it. The F1 sporting regulations state that "both cars entered by a competitor must be presented in substantially the same livery at each event". This is open to interpretation - does it simply cover the basic design? The colours? Both? The very need to ask these questions points to how ridiculous the rule even is.

F1 would be in a win-win position if teams weren't forced to make both cars look the same. BAR's attempt at split liveries in 1999 is the infamous example of an F1 team trying to do something different. Though it quickly drew the ire of the FIA - and even went to the International Chamber of Commerce's International Court of Arbitration - the idea was sound.

"This approach has generated controversy in Formula 1 circles," said Tom Moser, the head of global sponsorship of one of BAR's chief backers British American Tobacco. "From our standpoint it's difficult to understand why. After all, Formula 1 teams have in the past run dual-liveried cars. It certainly doesn't detract from the overall show. If anything, it enhances it."

Moser was right in principle, as would anyone who made similar comments today be. Where BAR went wrong was having two totally different designs. While creativity should be encouraged, teams are exactly that: teams. There should be some kind of cohesion in the design, if only to aid trackside and TV recognition.

The freedom IndyCar and NASCAR teams have to introduce special liveries is great, but creating a virtue of car identification has most value. Letting a driver have a different design to their team-mate is one thing, but when you get into the business of alternating liveries race-by-race it can quickly get confusing.

Making F1 car design a free-for-all is dangerous territory but the solution seems quite simple: F1's rulemakers and teams should follow the lead of their counterparts at Formula E and actively encourage split liveries.

FE's sporting regs have the same command as F1's but, crucially, with this prefix: "So that the competitor's cars may be easily distinguished from one another, each can have specific colours as long as the livery is common."

This was an addition to the FE sporting regs for the current 2017/18 season after the Dragon Racing team took advantage of the vagueness of the previous wording to cheekily introduce an 'inverted' livery for the last campaign. Jerome d'Ambrosio ran a black-to-white livery, while Loic Duval's went white-to-black.

Dragon, one of the few FE teams without a major manufacturer behind it, has continued its design independence for the coming campaign with much greater emphasis: one driver has an almost all-red car with white detailing, the other's is almost all-white with red detailing.

This is a team that has no real brand identity within FE, given it's small-fry compared to Renault, Audi, Jaguar and the like. But by going bold with its design it's arguably the most recognisable.

That's something for F1 to ponder given it is currently trying to think of lots of new ways to make people pay attention. And it's not like F1's never been willing to budge: David Coulthard ran the Wings for Life livery in his final grand prix, for example, with team-mate Mark Webber's car in traditional Red Bull garb.

Imagine if Force India rolled out two cars with the BWT 'bubble' design, one on pink and one on black? It creates excitement at the launch and would guarantee coverage on an international scale. And that will be even better because if the liveries are deliberately designed to reflect/complement one another, they will almost certainly look good.

Compromised efforts have the opposite effect. Remember Lucas di Grassi's non-Red Bull Red Bull livery in GP2, which like F1 demands teams run fundamentally the colour scheme on both cars? Or, on the flip-side, the time a Red Bull logo was plonked on the green Caterham GP2 livery when Pierre Gasly turned up at the end of 2014? The butchered attempts we've seen at differing liveries show that halfway houses simply don't make the grade.

Perhaps more importantly, split liveries would also make drivers instantly recognisable. Given F1's adopted the halo for this season, it is worthwhile considering that drivers are even more cocooned from the public eye than ever before. It's just not as easy to spot which driver is flashing past anymore - and that goes for those watching trackside, or from their sofa, or from a commentary booth trying to call the race.

That problem is so severe that F1's ended up in a needless tail-chasing situation of clamping down on changing helmet designs and enforcing bigger, clearer race numbers and driver abbreviations on engine covers, all in the name of distinguishing between drivers. What's easier to identify - a helmet design beneath a halo device, or a driver in a different coloured car?

The butchered attempts we've seen at differing liveries show that halfway houses simply don't make the grade

It's also good from a sponsor perspective. While the maths alone suggest that it would be unlikely for a sponsor to willingly reduce the number of cars branded in its colours, this misses the point. If a team can deck its cars out in different colours, that presents it with the potential for a completely different marketing strategy.

If you've got courting more than one potential major sponsor, there's no better way to get offer them a greater return on investment than more space on a car. It might not be the case for every company, but why wouldn't big sidepod branding on one car trump small logos on the endplate of two? That would be better than small gestures like when BAR/Honda chucked '555' logos on the sidepods in China from 2004-06, which is basically all the regulations have allowed in terms of ingenuity.

This isn't a call to let teams roll out art cars on a regular basis, but it is a request for a little bit of common sense. Given the ongoing push to improve fans' experience and enhance F1's image, it seems counter-productive to keep constraining the most visually impressive element of grand prix racing.

If F1 wants more people to pay attention, it needs to give them something to look at it.