So we’re just about half way through the 2021 season with a few weeks off until the next race, so let’s take a look at the best and worst liveries the teams have brought us this year.
Top 3
#3 – Monster Energy Yamaha
There haven’t really been any changes to the Yamaha livery this year, but it’s still one of the best on the grid. The black and blue work very well together, especially with the pinstripe design on the front and side.
Even the Monster logo works well here, the vibrant green popping out against the dark blue and black. It’s a coherent and well thought out design; happy to see it out there despite not being updated this year.
#2 – Tech3 KTM
Tech3 had a great livery last year with the orange and blue combo, but they’ve turned the orange up to the max this year, with nearly the entire bike covered in it. There’s no blue on the bike at all this time, instead replaced with black which may be to it’s detriment slightly, but it certainly doesn’t stop the bike looking great.
While I don’t think it’s quite as perfect as last season’s design, it’s an interesting and refreshing design, and gives the two KTM teams a little bit of individuality.
#1 – Suzuki Ecstar
Silver is usually a really middle of the road colour when it comes to livery design. However, paired as it has been with the lovely Suzuki blue, it takes this livery to the top of the pile. Their design last season was a little generic with the white and yellow flashes, whilst this one is unique and more appealing overall.
They’ve also managed to add the black Monster section to the bottom of the bike in a really positive way, integrating well into the livery and not slapping it on as an afterthought. It’s a massive improvement on 2020, and is my #1 livery for the year.
Bottom 3
#3 – Petronas Yamaha
The only thing more disappointing than Petronas Yamaha’s pace this season is their livery. From winning races a year ago to fighting to stay in the points, it’s been a bit of a disaster. The livery too is just a little boring I’m afraid. The turquoise is full of promise but paired with the dark grey, it just falls flat.
It certainly isn’t a stinker, but it really fails to excite, especially when their livery last year at least more interesting, albeit also not an amazing effort. Perhaps more turquoise and less charcoal would be make things a little more exciting.
#2 – Aprilia Gresini
Aprilia seems to have one of the least impressive liveries year after year. They’ve got some very standard but workable colours in the Italian red, white and green, but instead they use these as accents against matte black. It’s a really odd choice because their liveries end up lacking excitement and personality.
Then you have the Aprilia logo in yellow which doesn’t match any other part of the livery (perhaps the leathers, but that’s about it). It’s really uninspiring, matching their lacklustre pace, although Espargaro has dragged it up the field at the start of races often this year which is fantastic to see.
#1 – LCR Honda Castrol
This design looks like it’s trying to fit three separate liveries onto one bike. I guess this is the issue when you can’t snag a single big money sponsor, but there’s certainly a better way to get many sponsors looking good on the one machine.
There’s just a little too much going on this Honda, especially when compared to the stable mate Idemitsu bike, which with one major sponsor, looks so clean and uniform in comparison. It’s a design with a little too much going on, and whether by necessity or not, it makes it my least favourite livery of the year.
Do you agree with my choices? Let me know which bike you think looks best and worst this year!
This is my first time reviewing the full MotoGP grid, so hopefully I’m not too far out of my depth. MotoGP is always exciting to watch, especially when Marquez doesn’t take off into the distance, so thought that given I watch it most weekends, I may as well put this together.
Alma Pramac Ducati
It was a promising first race of the season for Pramac, with Miller shooting to the front of the grid before his seat failed. He’s joined by Francesco Bagnaia this season, after Petrucci’s promotion to the Ducati factory team. The bike itself is split pretty evenly between red and blue this year, divided by a diagonal white line on the sides – I’m uncertain as to how well this actually works, especially with the thinly outlined white Pramac logo on top of it.
The front doesn’t quite match the side, but looks great in its own regard – the spiked design fits the bike well. The white sections are nicely outlined with black, framing the number well. The black lines in front of the seat help the leathers match the bike in terms of design, and they are themselves nicely asymmetric with the colouring.
★★☆
Aprilia Factory Racing
It’s mainly black for Aprilia this year, supported by the classic Italian red, white and green. The fluro yellow might be one colour too many though, and it clashes pretty hard with the green on the bike and leathers.
The front of the bike is laid out well; the matte black helps of the number to stick out, and the red, white and green distributed well next to the windscreen only. A similar design is used to great effect on the tail of the bike too.
★★★
LCR Honda Idemitsu
The two LCR bikes are painted in separate designs, with Idemitsu clearly the major sponsor on Nakagami’s bike. The colours are distributed fairly evenly on the bike, mainly white on the side to show of the main sponsor, with a nice shade of red the other main colour on the bike. Black with gold piping is also used wisely, most prominently on the front and on the side sweeping to the tail.
I’m not the biggest fan of the design on the front. While it suits the shape of the windscreen, the shape of the white section is just a little off putting. Similarly, the way the number overlaps the gold lines is a little annoying, where it could have been smaller, or lines made a wider to avoid the issue.
★★★★
LCR Honda Castrol
Only some subtle changes for Crutchlow in 2019, with Givi still the main sponsor. The Italian colours feature again here, this time with a large red section for the main sponsor, with the smaller green sections seemingly placed for Castrol.
I like the green stripe that leads toward the tail; it’s adjacent to the Givi section but works very well given the forced separation of the two panels. The front is nicer here than the Idemitsu machine, but the number still overlaps the linework.
★★★☆
Mission Winnow Ducati
A fairly big change for 2019, with Ducati moving quite close to 100% red on their bikes, apart from two white lines which frame the Mission Winnow logo, and some cleverly placed black sections on mainly the underside.
It isn’t just plain red though, there’s an interesting pattern of different shades of red behind the Mission Winnow logo. Lenovo looks to have requested grey for their logo to sit on top of. Some other subtle touches include a tiny Italian flag under the NetApp logo, whilst rims are piped with the red, which looks fantastic.
★★★☆
Reale Avintia Racing
The Avintia team bring a fluorescent yellow onto the bike to accompany the white and blue this season. It’s a clean livery, with each sponsor given an appropriate amount of space and framing, although it ends up looking quite full with little room to spare.
The colour combination works just fine although I have some slight continuity issues, with the yellow lines directly against the other colours in most sections, whilst leave a tiny space of blue along the top section of the bike. Nothing super memorable about the design, apart from the suitcase handle winglets!
★★★
Red Bull KTM Factory Racing
After succeeding in pretty much every other level of Motorsport, you’d think Red Bull KTM are due to break through any year now. That said, even with a lot of KTM orange on the bike, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t feel this is unmistakably a Red Bull livery.
Navy blue and orange are a combination I’ve loved since my childhood, but the contrast of the orange, red and yellow is a bit too much, and fight for superiority rather than work in harmony. It’s essentially two different liveries on the one bike and ends up more disappointing than impressive. Not to say I entirely dislike it, but it could have looked a lot nicer if they favoured one style over the other.
★★
Red Bull KTM Tech 3
Now the Tech 3 livery takes the above issues and laughs at them. Subtract the red and yellow, replace with the Toro Rosso silver, and boom, a beautiful livery. The lovely blue colour complements the orange perfectly, whilst the silver works harmoniously with both.
Rather than 4 or 5 main colours, they’ve nailed just the 3. Colours aside, the designs of both the Red Bull KTMs is identical, yet this one is miles ahead in the looks department. Thank goodness for the Red Bull/Toro Rosso rebrand.
★★★★★
Repsol Honda Team
Marquez continues to dominate, winning all but one race he’s finished, whilst Lorenzo, who looked to have turned a corner last year, is yet to finish in the top 10 as I write this article. Thanks to Repsol backing, the factory Honda team livery hasn’t changed substantially since 1994, which is an incredible 25 year stretch of continuity.
That in mind, there isn’t much to talk about! The Repsol logo and colours are still proudly emblazoned across the whole bike, although the main design is not as circular as it used to be. The front of the bike is one of the cleanest though, which I am a fan of.
★★★★
Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP
Yamaha have made a slight change of livery direction. Monster has beefed up it’s sponsorship to take over almost the entire side of the bike and in turn, just about making black the main colour. It’s a cool, aggressive look, giving the design a negative space look, exaggerated by the blue pinstripes broken up by the Monster logo.
The pattern continues on the front where the Monster logos look a little messier crammed amongst the rider numbers and other design elements. The chrome strip diving the main sponsor and the rest on the side is a neat touch.
★★★★☆
Petronas Yamaha SRT
After years in Formula 1 and other car/bike categories, Petronas has joined the MotoGP field with Yamaha SRT. It’s refreshing that they haven’t followed Red Bull in a strict branding policy across all categories, going with a blend of turquoise, black and silver on this effort.
I can’t say I’m in love as for some reason, my first connection to the spray paint style gradients was those custom airbrushed trucker caps you’d find at tourist markets on holidays. OK, definitely a bit of a stretch, but despite my weird association, I can’t entirely dislike the livery. What it does do, is help me appreciate that silver and turquoise work better together than I gave it credit for (in F1), the black combo not looking quite as amazing as I’d imagined.
★★☆
Team SUZUKI ECSTAR
Suzuki are sticking with their royal blue and flashes of fluro yellow and white. It just sends me generic vibes, not just with the fairly standard shade of blue, but also the approach of the secondary colours, placed without a whole lot of ingenuity.
It ends up looking like a cookie cutter livery and makes it hard for them to stick out of the pack, especially when squads like Yamaha have owned a similar shade of blue for many years. I’d much sooner associate the Rizla Cyan colour with Suzuki than the current colour combination.
★★
Bonus Awards
Best Looker Award – Red Bull KTM Tech 3
The Toro Rosso Formula 1 livery is beautiful, and switching the red to orange doesn’t change that fact. Lovely design.
Least Attractive Award – Suzuki / Red Bull KTM
It’s not that Suzuki is ugly, it’s just a little boring and lacks a unique touch. KTM on the other hand is torn between two liveries and suffers for it.
So which was your favourite? Vote below! Don’t hesitate to leave a comment – let me know if there are any liveries you’d like me to review.
So things are starting to warm up with the new Formula E season under two months away. Mahindra has shown its hand, presenting its new livery and driver pairing of Nick Heidfeld and Felix Rosenqvist.
Mahindra did the awesome thing of putting their 2016-17 livery up to their fans. The made a shortlist of 14 fan made liveries and decided on this one, made by Adra Haro Jorba of Spain, which just happened to be my pick of the bunch too.
A lovely unique design, split pretty evenly between red and white, with red lines of varying width all over the car. I’d also like to note that I don’t mind the new front wing introduced this season. Adds a bit of personality to what was a very bland and generic open wheeler for the first two seasons.
NextEV had a brilliant livery last season, so whilst having a similar design, I can’t help but feel the metallic, slightly darker shade of blue is a bit of a downgrade. Nice carbon touches though, so I’ll wait until round one before giving my full judgement! Nelson Piquet Jr. and Oliver Turvey have been retained by the team.
Venturi is another team that has launched its new livery, along with new driver Maro Engel, who will be joining Stéphane Sarrazin.
Despite still being mainly black, the livery has changed rather significantly. There are two red bands, one red and one blue, on the end of the sidepods, which are an interesting design choice for a single seater, but not much else. It gave me instant FC Basel vibes for understandable reasons, but at the same time, Basel invokes different memories for some when it comes to Motorpsort. Perhaps a story for another day…
KTM will be stepping up to the premier class for the first time next season and have launched the bike and livery they will be racing with. Bradley Smith and Pol Espargaró will be riding the machine which quite frankly, isn’t far off what I had expected. It takes a lot of inspiration from their Moto3 bikes, with the navy blue for Red Bull and orange of course for KTM, which might I add is a favourite colour combination of mine.
The bike will make its debut in Valencia this year, which has been tested this year by Mika Kallio, Alex Hofmann and Randy De Puniet.
For me, MotoGP is fun to watch. The last couple of years I’ve tried my best to watch every race, simply because the racing is usually super exciting (especially Moto3 most weekends!). I don’t know a hell of a lot about its history and I don’t pretend to be an expert, but growing up watching a race from time to time, only a few things stuck with me. One of those things was the light blue Rizla Suzuki bikes, helped perhaps by the Australian media, thanks to Chris Vermeulen riding for them for a number of years. For years I had no idea what Rizla was, but I couldn’t separate the name from Suzuki.
For 2011, Suzuki kept Alvaro Bautista on after a decent first MotoGP season, whilst John Hopkins attended 3 race weekends. Rizla continued their sponsorship of the team and therefore, the bikes were once again that familiar shade of blue.
Over the years, the Rizla Suzuki team’s liveries had barely changed from plain light blue, apart from a small flash of yellow. The 2011 livery broke the mould, with a large black spike design along the edges of the bike. It was something very different, but as the majority of the bike was still in light blue, there was no denying it was a Rizla Suzuki. It’s a lovely design which doesn’t crowd the bike at all and is very aesthetically pleasing. Whilst the black spikes cover a large part of the bike, they remain quite subtle and allow the light blue to dominate the livery.
After moving to the CRT category in 2012 and a having year’s break in 2014, Suzuki are back in 2015, albeit minus Rizla. It’s just not the same!
The Livery Blog 
