23 May 2016 12:46 (UTC)
The liveries of McLaren
Think of an iconic McLaren and you’ll invariably think of a racing car painted red and white. Or silver. Or orange – our ‘traditional’ livery.
Except that our first F1 car was painted white. And green. Confused? Don’t be? Once the team found its feet, it adopted the famous papaya orange livery to make the cars distinctive on early black and white TVs. The eye-ball-searing Rocket Red, which first appeared in 1975, was another method of maximising TV coverage, and its remained to this day, even when the cars switched to silver (1997), reflective (2006) and, finally, ‘anthracite grey’, in 2015.
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