Livery Updates – July Catch Up

Looks like we’re at the end of the month already! Let’s take a look at what we’ve missed throughout July, starting with the good old Supercars.

Another week another sponsor for Percat, who has Dunlop Super Dealer backing this weekend in Ipswich. The iconic lettering never looks out of place on a racing car and the black on yellow background looks as good as ever. Keeping it simple here with two parallel stripes in red and black along the bottom of the car and giant Dunlop logo on the front door, which I associate more with shoes than cars these days.

The last of the wildcards has joined the grid in Ipswich, in the shape of the #35 Commodore, driven by Todd Hazelwood. Big Mate are the main sponsor of the car, who appear to be involved in GPS monitoring solutions, and have brought with them some pretty standard colours in red, white and blue. There’s a main diagonal blue section across the side, bordered by white and red, with white the main colour over the rest of the car. Very logo heavy this one, bringing a cluttered look to the livery.

Just quickly, it appears as though Castrol have reduced their backing on Mostert’s Super Cheap Auto car, which is great news, as Bosch now takes up the bonnet space with a black background. This allows the livery to look uniform and complete once again!

Skipping across to the States, we saw Rahal in an uncustomary yellow livery for Iowa. The Gehl sponsored machine was a beautiful shade of yellow, looking super simple and clean with just the single black line from nose to tail. The majority black wings help contrast the yellow making for a very nice livery overall.

One week later, however, Graham was back in red, but again, not his usual Steak ‘n Shake livery. This Rousseau backed livery was mainly red, with white over the top of the nose, cockpit and engine cover. As far as basic designs go, this is probably my favourite style, having the lighter shade of the ‘top’ surfaces of the car. Black wings bring a welcome third colour to the design.

We’ve also seen Rossi change colours since the start of the season. The blue is the same, but now features red where the yellow of Napa used to be. In this case, the entire sidepod is red rather than just what the Napa logo covered previously, on the usual Andretti design.

Penske had a couple of livery changes in Toronto, with Pagenaud switching to a car seemingly in greyscale. While I’m not usually a big fan of liveries without colour *cough* Haas *cough*, this is a decent looking novelty that should only last a race or two. Also important to note that silver, not grey, is used, and as the third colour, not the primary.

A simple change for Newgarden too, with DeVilbiss bringing a bright orange in place of the Verizon silver. I love organge as a colour, but this is certainly a downgrade.

Most recently, Chip Ginassi have joined in on the Indycar chrome livery fad, spicing up the usual NTT Data livery. It’s a nice super reflective blue along the engine cover, nose and wings, complementing the plain white well. There are also a neat detail in what resembles a big brush stroke, in different colours of blue, filling up some of the white space. A nice livery but we’ll see if it’s only a one off.

Finally, switching over to Formula e and MS Amlin Andretti have made significant changes to their livery, adding some big chunks of teal, literally on top of the existing livery. They’ve gone about it with a torn paper effect, which actually looks quite nice and hides to lazy thought behind the idea.

Finally, this update isn’t new but one I guess I should cover. Haas went and made their livery EVEN MORE BORING since the disappointment they revealed at the beginning of the season. In a corporate move Ron Dennis would have applauded, they’ve made the red sections white, so they could stand out more. Technically this may be the case in terms of copywriting, but I can’t imagine a time that white would be more eye-catching than red? Either way, boo to you, Haas, the biggest livery let down on the grid.