It's Miami Grand Prix weekend, which for whatever reason has become a big outlet for special F1 liveries. Three teams have come out with new looks for their cars this weekend as of Wednesday evening: Sauber, Racing Bulls and Ferrari.
The thing about special liveries is that very often, they feature just minor changes, or merely an alteration of a major color. Take the Senna McLaren last year at Monaco, which was a cool look but really just a shift from papaya to yellow. Or the Mercedes at Miami in 2022, which only added a very minor splash of color.
Very rarely do one-off looks really hit both boxes of "memorable" and "good-looking." The McLaren 2021 Monaco look might fall in that category.
The point being, most of these one-off liveries tend to be forgotten. Or sometimes they are plain bad.
So far, each look falls in each category: one great, one forgettable, one bad. Let's rank them.
3. Ferrari: Oh no
Ferrari is celebrating a year with HP onboard with the Scuderia, and unfortunately it also means it has been a year that the classic Ferrari scheme has looked worse than it would be without it.
Their overalls look silly with a double, big blue HP logo and the red scheme is watered down with the HP additions. But it's still decent.
This Miami livery, though, is brutal.
The car looks like a bit of a mess; the shapes that the blue and white are mixed in with just looked forced. It really doesn't work. Maybe not as out of place as the green in 2021, but still.
The HP suits for this weekend look fine, nothing too special. A full blue and white livery might've been really cool, but we know there's no way Ferrari would allow that, right?
2. Sauber: Forgettable
Sauber is a team that is kind of stuck with a few years of this Kick branding before becoming Audi, so the effort to really make the scheme work has never been that obvious.
It's a car that exists on a team that doesn't really produce results often. So the car doesn't get seen often.
In case you forget what the regular car looks like, here it is. So the difference this weekend is the green is "splashed on" to make it a livery that is "inspired by Miami's vibrant art scene."
Sure, why not.
1. Racing Bulls: Beauty
That's not Racing Point, that's Racing Bulls.
The Red Bull junior team has a bit more creative freedom as the B team in the lot, and a car that's base color is white. So the team went all in on the Miami Vice pink ā and really knocked it out of the park.
While the scheme itself isn't really complicated at all, the pink and white really compliment and jump off the page on a grid that loves it carbon fiber or similar shades of blue.