A motorsport life in graphic detail

If you’re a regular in British motorsport paddocks, the slight-of-build, grey-haired figure is in all probability one you recognise – without necessarily knowing what his role is. But George Holroyd, now a sprightly 79 years of age, has played a part that you certainly will appreciate: his prolific design of racing car liveries over the past four decades has helped shape the look of motorsport not just in the UK, but beyond.

From Brands Hatch 1980s Ford Escorts to Formula 1, via the British Touring Car Championship and a host of junior single-seater categories, Holroyd has been a man in demand, trading under the name of Geographics Design.

He’s one of the quietest and most unassuming of characters you could meet, and perhaps that’s partly down to his falling into the sport quite by accident. That owed a lot to the Holroyd family moving to West Kingsdown, on the doorstep of Brands Hatch, when he was in his early twenties in 1967, but even then he didn’t get properly involved until well into the 1980s.

“I followed racing – my father watched what motorsport was on the TV,” he muses. “He did some motorbike racing before the war at Brooklands, so he said.”

Holroyd was “signwriting and woodcrafting signs” when he was asked to lend a hand by local team Valour Racing, which was competing in F3 with Ross Cheever and Paul Jackson, and in Formula Ford 1600 with its young protege Johnny Herbert.

When Herbert took his first Junior FF1600 win in a BP round at Silverstone on 2 September 1984, Holroyd “had to paint a laurel wreath and ‘Silverstone’” on the Van Diemen. Rod Birley was another neighbourhood client in his hot rod days, but “I’d been on the periphery of it. It’s Jack Brabham who got me into the mainstream.”

Watsons (with apostrophe in period) sponsored Rouse and Harvey Macau RS500s

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

The three-time F1 world champion had set up Jack Brabham Racing to run son Gary in the British F3 Championship in 1986 from a Brands base. “I always say it was Jack who rang me,” relates Holroyd, “but it was probably Marc Julyan [the team manager, who went on to senior roles at Paul Stewart Racing, and Audi Sport UK in the BTCC] because he was from West Kingsdown.

“The first thing I painted was the words ‘Wagga Wagga’ – that’s what Jack wanted on the car. I said, ‘That’s a made-up place’, but it’s where Jack came from! Jack had a great sense of humour.”

Soon Holroyd was in the door at Brands itself. This was in the days when pretty much anything that moved at the Kentish amphitheatre seemed to be clad in Cellnet signwriting – Holroyd’s treasure trove of a studio still has lettering from the brick-size-mobile-phone giant lying around. He worked on liveries for the school – and celebrity race – Escorts, while the Brands-run Formula First category was also getting off the ground.

Back then, the work entailed artwork by hand and a distinctly Blue Peter-esque application

Inaugural FFirst champion Ben Edwards employed Holroyd’s skills, and the future commentary great’s cohorts at Olympic Motorsport then moved into a period of Champion of Brands FF1600 domination in the Universal Salvage Auctions livery he designed. Fast-forward to 1991, and this author’s Olympic-run FFirst was also adorned in Holroyd-applied USA colours!

Back then, the work entailed artwork by hand and a distinctly Blue Peter-esque application: “The biggest graphics in those days I used to cut out by hand on the drawing board. I’d draw and cut out the letters – that’s where the signwriting skills came in I suppose.

People started asking, ‘Could you Fablon the wings?’, which was a generic name for sticky-back plastic, it was what you used on kitchen cabinets and things. I then went to my signwriting suppliers and they had a good product called X-Film, which was German. It was hard work to wrap it, because it was not the nice stuff they have now.”

Brabham family played a key role in getting Holroyd started; here’s David at Macau in 1989

Photo by: Sutton Images/Getty Images

With Gary Brabham moving to Bowman Racing for 1988, Jack Brabham Racing continued in Class B of British F3, running the promising John Penfold before Sir Jack’s younger son David switched over from his Vauxhall Lotus campaign.

It was at this time that Holroyd had his first racing trip abroad: “I went to Spa with them. David was lapping quickly and they kept putting out P2, and he was going harder and harder and he came in and said, ‘Well, who’s ahead of me?’ He thought they were giving him P2 in Class B and he was P2 overall.

“That’s when Jack took me round the old circuit, which was an experience. The recall of it all, and to be sitting there with someone who had actually done it, and you seeing the white house flash by, and the ditches, and you shake your head…”

At Bowman, Jack Brabham “didn’t like the NEC livery that they’d designed. He said, ‘Could you do something?’ So I did that and that work at Bowmans was a big foot in the door.” Back then, a young Trevor Carlin was team manager at Bowman, run by his uncles Steve and Vic Hollman, with Anthony ‘Boyo’ Hieatt (now head at Double R Racing) and Adrian Burgess (latter-day Aussie Supercars tech supremo) among the engineers.

This was the nucleus of what would become the formidable Carlin Motorsport powerhouse in the early 2000s. And Hieatt’s first job after leaving the Welsh valleys had been at Jack Brabham Racing. “He was the one who opened the door to me the first time I went to see them – it was his first day at work,” laughs Holroyd.

Bowman was the international springboard. “‘Boyo’ came back from Macau in 1988 and said, ‘George, you’ve got to come to Macau next year’. I booked my trip – I was just going to go as a holiday – and then the agent for Watsons Water got in touch. The agent said, ‘We hear you’re going out so we’ll pay for you’. That was the start of working with them and that went on into the mid-2000s with touring cars.”

Clifford the Dragon from ’80s TV ads adorned Vic Lee-run BMWs

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

Watsons had already cloaked the Macau-winning Reynard of Andy Wallace in 1986, and its sub-division Mr Juicy had backed Martin Donnelly’s Ralt to victory the following year. For 1989, along with sister company Hutchison Telecom, it would sponsor a six-car ‘superteam’ comprising Steve Robertson and Derek Higgins (both Bowman), Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Julian Bailey (both Schubel), Antonio Tamburini (Prema) and Gianni Morbidelli (Forti).

Holroyd was commissioned to come up with the liveries for each, as well as the Watsons-backed Sierra RS500s of Andy Rouse and Tim Harvey in the Guia race, plus the Bowman-run Brabham boys (eventual winner David with Kawai Steel, Gary with Shell and TAG Heuer).

The F3 octet wasn’t the work of a moment: while Bowman ran Ralts, Schubel and Prema had Reynards, and Forti a Dallara. Luckily, Holroyd could now work alongside his Italian-based nephew George Zerbino (who is now in the UK and whose son Alex is also in the family trade).

His first full F1 commission did not come until 2005, when Midland took over the Jordan team

“The agent said to me, ‘You’ve got to go to Monza because you’ve got to measure a Dallara, because there aren’t any Dallaras in England,’” reflects Holroyd. “I wouldn’t think twice now, but I was worried about how to get a ticket… The liveries had to look similar from a Ralt to a Reynard to a Dallara. Then I found out my passport had expired. So from there we drove to Schubels in Germany up the Po Valley in the fog with my nephew in his Mk4 Escort – no suspension because he’d had it lowered!”

Holroyd was prolific through the 1990s and 2000s – his artwork of Clifford the Dragon, who adorned the Listerine-backed Vic Lee-run BMWs in the early days of Super Touring, still resides in his studio, among numerous mementoes. But his first full F1 commission did not come until 2005, when Midland took over the Jordan team.

Holroyd’s ‘rival’, in the loosest possible sense of the word, had been the late Ron Lee, a man Holroyd describes as nothing but helpful and supportive. Lee was responsible, among other things, for Marlboro McLarens, the 1991 7-Up Jordan, and was first encountered by Holroyd at Bowman when Lee was working on liveries for its Harvey furniture-backed Ralts.

Here’s some I did earlier: wrapped and used BTCC bonnets

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

Carlin had been appointed by new Midland/Jordan principal Colin Kolles as sporting director, while fellow Bowman/Carlin old boy Burgess – who coined Holroyd’s widely used nickname ‘Sticky George’ – also joined, and soon moved into the sporting chief role when Carlin stepped down.

“Trevor spoke to me at the Bahrain F3 race [in late 2004],” recalls Holroyd. “He wanted me to do the graphics because Colin Kolles never wanted an in-house person, and he said it was too much for Ron to do the F3 [with Carlin] and the F1 and he’s not particularly bothered – he’d done F1. Which would I like to do? I was very lucky to get the opportunity, and I said I’d do the F1. We’ve stayed doing that ever since.”

With his nephew and great-nephew, Holroyd has kept that role through the team’s subsequent years as Spyker, Force India, Racing Point and now Aston Martin. But he’s realistic now that F1 is getting harder to retain a foothold in. For a period, there was demand for ultra-thin stickers: “But you’ve still got edges. It’s one of those arguments…” Now there is a move to ‘coating’ (thin paint) rather than ‘wrapping’.

Holroyd was intrigued by Red Bull’s use of this technique, and had struck up a relationship with Adrian Newey when they both attended the MRF Challenge in India, in which Newey’s son Harri was competing. He was given the opportunity of examining the cars in the Red Bull garage at the Australian Grand Prix in 2020 and flew over, “but unfortunately COVID kicked in and it shut down. Just a missed opportunity. It’s all changing.”

Holroyd had already carried out some work for Red Bull in the 2000s with its one-off ‘film’ liveries for the Monaco GP (“Jennifer Aniston came along – that was very nice!”), and still retains a tenuous link with the team via Max Verstappen’s GT operation.

“The main thing I did physically in 2025 were the GT3 cars for 2 Seas Motorsport,” he explains. “Their Mercedes won the British championship [with Kiern Jewiss and Charles Dawson] and“ they’ve also been running that Aston Martin – the verstappen.com car.

British GT-winning 2 Seas Motorsport Merc got the Holroyd touch

Photo by: JEP

“There’s been a lot of work on that, and they won their championship as well [GT World Challenge Europe Gold Cup, with Chris Lulham and Thierry Vermeulen]. That’s taken quite a lot of time because obviously there’s been a lot of races and a lot of damage, and travelling up and down.”

Single-seaters has been quiet for Holroyd – “As we get older, I’m doing less” – but his old mucker Hieatt has been in discussion for Double R’s return to racing in Eurocup-3.

And he’s also still involved in one of his early stomping grounds: FF1600, principally with Bernard Dolan’s team. Among the bric-a-brac at Holroyd’s base is an old wooden board from the Kentagon listing the Champion of Brands FF1600 title winners, ostensibly from 1983 to 1990, upon which he annually stuck the lettering for each new champion.

Problem was, he started with duff information: Andy Ackerley is listed as 1983, Karl Jones 1984, but they were 1982 and 1983 respectively, and 1984 champion Chris Ringrose is missing entirely. “I saw Andy and Chris at the weekend [our interview takes place just after the Festival],” he chuckles, “and we were talking about that. Chris is still annoyed. It’s probably why they let me have it…”

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the March 2026 issue and subscribe today. 

Missing champion still sore about ex-Kentagon Brands FF1600 winners board

Photo by: Gary Hawkins