The trend apparent in F1 2024's latest disappointing livery that needs to change

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.

The very sparse paintwork that exists on the Alpine, irritatingly, hints at a really good idea to mix up the colour scheme were it applied to the whole car. Instead, it's as if the design department ran out of Dulux and the cost cap prevented them from a trip to Homebase to pick up some more. There's a pink variant to be used at to sate title sponsor BWT's desires of hydrating the world and turning it salmon-coloured simultaneously, but this is in the same format as the barely-blue version.

So far, we've got carbon and orange, carbon and green, carbon and white, and carbon and blue/pink. Assuming Mercedes will be carbon and teal, Red Bull going unchanged for the 19th consecutive season suddenly feels like a tantalising prospect. Ferrari, Aston Martin, and RB will also be leaned upon to make some effort with their liveries.

Joking aside, it's going to become very difficult to identify the cars from certain angles, especially for the fans in the grandstand. It might be slightly easier to see on TV as cars are generally filmed front-on, but in an ideal world (or even just a normal world) it shouldn't be that difficult to tell teams apart. The prevalence of exposed carbon was mentioned in the Sauber launch feature on Monday, but this was before we knew that Alpine was going to completely forego any semblance of a cohesive livery.

Now, the jesting has been supplanted by irritation. The most heinous part? Alpine's World Endurance Championship Hypercar is fully painted and looks rather good - so there's no excuse. Something has to change here.

Alpine's A524 was revealed on Wednesday

Photo by: Alpine

(On a slight tangent, this was supposed to be a piece detailing Alpine's launch spec car, given that it was billed as the 2024 car. But instead, nosecone aside, it looks suspiciously like the 2023 car with a worse paint job. Actually, it wouldn't be all that surprising if Alpine's way of developing an entirely new car was to end up with something that looks far too much like the old one. But I digress...)

In football, there are rules in place to ensure that teams don't clash on the pitch. The Premier League's regulations state that: "When playing in League Matches the players of each participating club shall wear a strip which differs visibly from and contrasts with one another to ensure that match officials, players, spectators and television viewers (including those with colour vision deficiency) will be able to distinguish clearly between the two teams."

Should Aston Villa play against West Ham, for example (or Burnley, but only every other season), both teams can't kick off in their claret and blue shirts; the away team will have to opt for its designated away kit. And that's been both a rule and a common-sense approach throughout football's history.

Now, there's so little effort being put into livery design that it surpasses minimalism and now looks like nothing but laziness

F1 has very few rules governing the livery design, only really delineating between the two drivers in a team with T-cam colours. Presumably, the championship has always run on the basis of teams having very clear identities, or sponsors hurling a shipping container's worth of finance to daub the car in their own colours.

On a few rare occasions, two teams have occasionally turned up to a race with slightly similar colour schemes: Red Bull and Toro Rosso both used similar motifs pre-2017, but there was sufficient difference between them to identify which was which. McLaren's silver cars differed to those of Mercedes between 2010-2014, as their wing colour and trim were distinct enough to separate them.

But in each of those cases, this considers just two teams with similar liveries. F1 has the unprecedented situation of having four teams with the same base colour, with more anticipated. The most heinous part about it is that we all saw it coming at some point, or at least cynically suggested that it might be the way. Since the paint-weight cat was let out of the bag, engineers at F1 teams perhaps started to question why they bothered to paint the cars when they could get a few kilograms back and convert it to ballast. The suggestions are that paint adds about 5-6kg for a full-body spray.

Even though teams started to cut the amount of paint used to meet the minimum weight in 2022, there has been little sign of them topping up their colour palettes despite their iterative weight reductions since then. Trust in the teams to bring the colour back has been misplaced, and it might be time for those in charge of the rules to intervene.

From certain angles, the 2024 liveries revealed so far may prove difficult to tell apart

Photo by: McLaren

Perhaps mandating a minimum area of car area to be painted would work; if a team has black or grey in their identity, then they can paint it on, but it dissuades the teams from doing the absolute bare minimum. Ensuring that all 10 teams have some degree of identifiable colour scheme is beneficial from a marketing and a spectator standpoint, and perhaps a variation of the aforementioned Premier League rule would be satisfactory to meet this.

After all, F1 is built on branding and its visual spectacle, and the idea of 20 carbon-grey cars with the bare minimum of paint trim detracts from the excitement. This writer started watching F1 in the 1990s, where the grids were more vibrant than the pools of gunge that permeated through every kids' TV show of that era. We've now entered the Deano-core era of F1, where once-colourful cars and house decor have been supplanted by metallic grey pearl Audi A5s, monochromatic crushed velvet furniture and whitewashed walls.

And there's a cynicism to it, a tacit realisation that painting a car a nice colour doesn't win races, so why even bother? Maybe the sponsors would mind a bit, but most aren't paying enough to influence the design of the car; a simple white sticker on a black background suffices, so long as their names are out there.

But that's not the magic of the F1 that this writer grew up with, an age where BAR quite literally zipped two liveries together, where Sauber crammed Red Bull AND Petronas' incongruous colours together and somehow made it work, or how Benson & Hedges threw money at Jordan to paint its car like a hornet. This was a time when teams wanted to stand out and develop something iconic. Now, there's so little effort being put into livery design that it surpasses minimalism and now looks like nothing but laziness. In 20 years from now, it would be wholly surprising if any of the cars shown so far joined the pantheon of style icons from F1's past.

This isn't meant to convey anger, or specifically direct it at Alpine, but rather sums up the disappointment that F1's current teams don't seem to care about a very crucial component of the championship: its spectacle. Watching cars battle on track is great and it's what we're here for, but it loses something when it's a grey car fighting against a different grey car. It's not the 1950s anymore; we don't need to waste our 8k televisions (or, if you're poor like me, that small Toshiba HDTV you bought a decade ago) on a monochrome championship. The cars should be the stars in F1, rather than just blending into the tarmac and looking like half-painted, half-finished carbon fibre sculptures.

With the greater prevalence of cookie-cutter street circuits, the current trend of cars barely being tickled by a paintbrush gives the impression that F1's just going through the motions at the moment. A soullessness permeates from F1's increasingly corporate-restricted nature, stiff and inert like the slow creep of rigor mortis. F1 needs its colour back.

When compared to the colour palate of late '90s Formula 1 cars, the current crop leaves plenty to be desired

Photo by: Motorsport Images