The Good and the Bad – F1 livery from 1991
Yesterday, the 25th January 2010 say the first launch of a 2010 Formula 1 car. The car in question was the new Mercedes GP car from the team that was formally Honda and then title winners Brawn GP last year, but it wasn’t in fact a new car that was being unveiled yesterday, it was in fact just the new livery for Mercedes GP painted on last years Brawn GP car. That gave me an idea for a series of blog posts though. Between now and the first race in Bahrain on the 14th March I’m hoping to run through what have been, in my opinion the best and worst looking car liveries to be seen in Formula 1 each year, since the 1991 season to the upcoming 2010 season. That will be twenty blog posts in total.
Why am I starting with 1991 season? Well for one that was when I started following Formula 1, and if I only went back a few years with this I reckon it would be rather dull. The 90′s in my opinion say a lot more good looking F1 cars than we have seen recently, and a lot more variety.
So lets get on with it then.
1991 – The Good
Team 7Up Jordan
Automobiles Gonfaronaise Sportive (AGS)
1991 – The Bad
Coloni Racing Srl
Fondmetal F1 SpA
I’ve not met a single person in F1 who doesn’t love the Jordan 7up. Absolutely love it, its stunning!!!
I’m not sure if it was the design or the fact that Jordan was an Irish teams, but they are a primary reason for why Formula 1 grabbed my interest when it did. The design and livery on that 7Up Jordan though still looks fantastic, doesn’t seem to have aged at all. But looking back at the cars on the 1991 grid, all the cars generally speaking looked great.
The Fondmetal one rather looks like they simply didn’t have enough pieces to build the car and had to scavenge ones from other teams, hence the fact the colours don’t match.
Everything about that first Jordan just looks right. The shape, the curves, the proportions and even the livery. It just looks right.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the Jordan 191 was designed by three people who effectively made their own design space after finding that EJ had provided them with a ruler, a drawing board and a pencil. There’s a certain kind of imaginative creativity possible in a simple-but-customised design environment that is difficult to replicate in a corporate, complicated place.
Love the Jordan.