The 50 Greatest Race Car Liveries

professional motorsportslivery50 Greatest Race Liveries of All Time

Looking to improve on the disappointing EJ10, Jordan made a bunch of mechanical and aerodynamical changes to its 2001 car. There was the addition of a seventh gear, a proper Honda engine, and a higher front nose. It was the pointier nose that led the team to hire designer Peter Boutwood to draw up a shark design for the front end. Jordan didn't notch any wins that season, but at least they finished every race, and looked good doing it.

Who knew Jackie Stewart was Scottish? The Flying Scott just couldn't help but give his F1 team a bit of personal branding by draping a sash of tartan over and throughout his maiden team's car, à la his old helmet design.

When Alexander Calder's friend, Herve Poulain, asked him to design a "rolling canvas" for his BMW 3.0 CSL, we bet he never thought he'd start a tradition that would be around 30 years later: the BMW Art Car. With swooping curves and bold colors, Calder's design stood out among the rest of the entrants in the 1975 24 Hours of Le Mans. And it still stands out today in BMW's museum.

There isn't a nice way to say that this Nissan was a bastard child birthed in corporate bizzaro-world. Yet, when the mighty OEM HVAC specialists Calsonic draped a pale-blue interpretation of its company color as a skewed checkered-flag pattern over its shell, magic happened, transforming a maniacal design into something sublime.

It's splashy, somewhat random paint scheme doesn't appear that cohesive. But that's because you're not watching it tear past you at night. It's taped-up livery was made of reflective 3M material—photographed at night, it was all livery and no car.

Renault's current all-yellow-everything paint scheme is eye catching, yes, but it didn't flow as well to us as its previous aqua blue and faded yellow livery. But maybe that's because it was applied to its last championship-winning car.

The McLaren Formula 1 team livery has changed many times since its inception in 1966, but our favorite may be the one that covered Aryton Senna and Alain Prost. Yeah, you don't have much of a choice of colorways when your main sponsor is Marlboro, but the simple red-and-white design kept most of the focus where it should have been: on the drivers.

Painting your Corvette rebel-red and crossing stars and bars over the roof is a bit like grabbing low-hanging fruit. It's said that the rebel motif was to separate it from the other rival Corvettes on the grid. It was separated all right, by taking first-in-class at the 12 Hours of Sebring and the 24 Hours of Daytona.

Love or hate the German digestif, but you gotta recognize Jägermeister's boldness in painting its entire car bright orange. By utilizing this loud color, it instantly created an iconic commercial color scheme, and one that brought worldwide attention to one of the most misunderstood drinks ever made.

It's a jovial color scheme, don't ya think? Like Harlequin Volkswagens, the multicolor graphics kept the B188 looking unique from every angle. The United Colors of Benetton were known for its risque clothing ads, so it's too bad none of that daringness carried over to the driving in its motorsport efforts.

The GT One's closed cockpit architecture accepted Toyota's white paintbrush theme nicely, unlike the dainty F1 car that wore similar clothes years later.

You know your utility vehicle has style to spare when it can be painted Camel cigarette-butt tan and still look badass. Yet, there's something ruggedly business-casual about the color tan that just works on a Land Rover. Camel Trophy nostalgics gather at cameltrophystore.co.uk for swag. Not to mention, it still looks relatively clean after a muddy race.

Start with an ugly car, paint some ugly swirls on it in your sponsor's family of colors, and voila! An instantly recognizable rally car is born. The hideousness of it all cancels itself out by doing a nasty 360, leaving you with memories of Toyota's domination in the World Rally Championship.

Despite not being an official Mercedes-Benz factory racer (Mercedes supplied the engines), the Sauber team still employed M-B's legendary silver paint job. Though it got off to a rocky start, the C9 found its groove in 1989, winning all but one race, and setting the record for fastest top speed in the history of the 24 Hours of Le Mans with a recorded speed of 248 mph. Talk about a silver arrow.

When national colors were traded for big tobacco money, pride died a slow death. Team Lotus' acceptance of Imperial Tobacco's Gold Leaf brand as a sponsor was the first time sponsorship occurred in F1. And we'll be damned if gold, red, and white wasn't a sexier colorway than Britain's racing green.

At first glance, it looks like a complete mess. But look again. In the flesh, there's so much going on, you really have to stand back to take it all in. The airbrush magicians at Troy Lee Designs brought Flying Lizard Racing's standard kit up a level—its attention to detail is incredible, if not overwhelming.

When Apple sponsored this Porsche it hadn't yet released its personal computer, the Macintosh 128K. Many 935s had similarly applied graphics, but none had Apple's rainbow. In 1998, Apple dropped color for a monochromatic logo. How boring would that be on a race car?

Before corporate sponsorships swallowed the effigy of the American race car, a number and a color was all that could be seen on the outside of a car. Back then, a unique color and effective decal placement was all you needed to stand out from other cars in your race series. Ah, the good ol' days.

The JGTC racing series is exactly like NASCAR, just different. Flashy paint is the norm with most cars in this series, but this one is an anomaly. How ironic is it that this simple, yet bold paint scheme looks inherently American when Skylines were never sold in the U.S.A.?

When is it OK to get all Too Fast Too Furious with your paint job? When it's a gutted NSX built for racing, that's when. There's a trickle-down effect when a race car's color scheme is bright yellow and bright green. Somehow, it makes it all right for tuner cars to be decked out in similarly obnoxious colors.

Nine years after Bill Cosby threw down several million dollars to finance Willy T. Ribbs' first-black-man-at-the-Indy 500 campaign, a marketing gem was unearthed. Donning the pan-African tri-colorway, the car featured FUBU and Cristal as major sponsors—but without an African-American behind the helm. For them, by us?

When Rothmans parted ways with Porsche, it left valuable real estate up for grabs. And when the ad sales team and the graphics department put their minds together, bet they didn't pitch asymmetry as the next big thing in race car graphic design.

The Intimidator's nickname wouldn't have the same effect if he drove a Mr. Goodwrench-sponsored car today. The company's soulless new Web 2.0 rebranding would look utterly vapid on a race car. But gray, black, and red? Bad. Ass.

BMW built a handful of M1s to run in the one-make Procar Series, pitting the best drivers against each other in identical cars. Germany's greatest touring car driver, Hans Stuck, piloted the BASF M1 to second place. Maybe if he had this rockin' ad to boot him in the ass he would have beaten Niki Lauda.

Leave it to a French racing team to assemble, maintain, and campaign America's most balls-out muscle car. In what seems like a livery oozing America's red, white, and blue, it's really just France's blue. white, and red.

Ford thought it'd be a grand idea to buy a successful F1 team, brand it Jaguar, and have a go at the world's most expensive motorsport. It was a total failure. However, for one year it had the tightest livery on the grid. Made-for-TV British racing green combined with offsetting gold wheels and, of course, the leaping cat on the air inlet made up for the upsetting number of DNFs.

Richard Petty only raced cars that were "Petty Blue," a color his father accidentally mixed with leftover paint. When STP approached Petty about sponsorship and changing the color of his car to satiate corporate interests, he refused. STP buckled and just slapped a big-ass STP sticker on the hood. ESPN produced a documentary, Petty Blue, on the topic.

Honda fell prey to the "green" zeitgeist when it decked out its whole car in an uninterrupted image of planet Earth. The ambition is ovation-worthy; however, design-wise, it was a little undercooked and revised the following year. Still, we have to give props to the vision and execution that made it better than most other cars on this list.

Warhol's BMW M1 Art Car, which reportedly took him 23 minutes to paint, seems awfully dated next to Koons' futuristic piece. What Warhol hoped to accomplish—portraying "speed pictorially"—was brought to fruition with this GT2 racer. It's as if the car burst through the entire starting grid of another dimension.

Red Bull Racing's (RBR) regular Fomula 1 livery is pretty awesome in of itself—the dark, deep blue, with the Red Bull logo leaping over the driver—but even better was RBR's 2007 Faces for Charity livery. Partnering with Wings for Life, a charity that supports research for spinal cord injuries, RBR allowed fans to send in photos of themselves along with $15 for the chance to have them added to a collage that would adorn Mark Webber's and David Coulthard's cars.

The ethos of "race on Sunday, sell on Monday" hit hard when BMW's factory race team created the illusion that the parts that made this car competitive on the race track would find its way down to the Bimmer parked in your garage. Hey, it worked for us.

Audi sent this painted wonder to compete in Australia as an ambassador to an American race series (American Le Mans Series). It encapsulates all of the Aussie nature on one 200 mph car. The attention to detail is ridiculous—from largemouth-bass air inlets to the (accurate?) floating trash.

Team Penske and Mark Donohue campaigned several cars—Porsches, Camaros, Ferraris, even AMC Javelins—all under one sponsor: Sunoco. The classic blue-and-yellow duo has stood the test of time as one of motorsports' most recognized color pairings.

The double cigarette sponsorship of 555 and Lucky Strike wasn't just a middle finger to anti-tobacco lobbyists, it was a British Longbowman's salute.

Jake, a skull with bow-tie eyes, started off as mini B-pillar mascot until it found a cult following with 'Vette fanatics. At the end of the 2007 season, Jake made the big time and had his skull splattered on the door and hood. Mean and viscious.

With a touch more class than a black-and-gold Adidas track suit, the original John Player Special cigarette livery was as elegant and classy as you could get without being dainty.

An experiment in aerodynamics created a stubby 917 with its wheels tucked inward. The press dubbed it "The Pig" because of its dimensions. A few days before the race, it was painted like a butcher's carcass diagram. Martini, the sponsor, refused to have its name on it. Their loss.

Subaru re-branded itself as the AWD tuner car off the strength of its title sponsor and the sweat off of Colin McCrae's brow. 555 Cigarettes' blue-and-gold logo would ever-so-slightly gradient into what is today known as Blue Mica. Google "Subaru WRX" and you'll see what we mean.

Alitalia Airlines was the perfect sponsor for this thoroughbred Italian racer. Not so much because it was often airborne, but because it was designed by Bertone (Italian), built by Lancia (Italian), and had a Ferrari engine (duh, Italian). The Stratos' yellow wheels were a nice outside-the-box accent, too.

Psychedelia of the 1960s somehow trickled down into '70s design with this one. Porsche's "Hippie Car" had a free-thinking, free-form livery that paid no mind to the conventions of traditional paint jobs, which normally did not stray from a car's body lines.

Sometimes all it takes is a simple giant arrow. After all, forward is the only direction a 1,200 lb, 370hp race car should be facing. Applying a singular expressive graphic like a fat arrow gives the car the illusion of speed even at zero mph.

The thought of a purple-and-yellow Jaguar conjures up half-digested poacher's puke. But Silk Cut cigs were made so chic thanks to Saatchi & Saatchi's logo design and its partnership with TWR's race squad. The slab-sided rear-wheel skirts acted as the perfect uninterrupted canvas for this car's oh-so-'80s paint job.

Alan Mann's iconic red and gold was, and still is, immediately recognizable in the motorsports community. Gold usually equals gaudy, but Mann's red/gold combo has a gentlemanly air to it.

The Cobra Coupe wasn't the first car to wear skunk stripes, but it wore them the best. The way the wide stripes fall on the Cobra's long hood and short cabin make it an icon. This legendary racer would become the most expensive American car sold at auction, selling for $7.25 million.

Martini Racing's livery pattern is the most repeatable in all of motorsports. The blue hues accented with red would make any car look like a champion.

The Porsche 959 was an awesome, if misunderstood car. Though insanely fast and technologically advanced, Porsche's foray with it into Group B rally racing didn't fare as well as hoped. However, that didn't stop it from becoming one of the most remembered and iconic Dakar rally racers of all time, thanks to its Rothmans tobacco livery.

Stitched together with swaths of green and DayGlo orange, obscure clothing company Renown sponsored this Franken-fashion-victim. The 787b is the only Japanese car to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans—and it was done with a rotary engine, which was also a first and only. Fun fact: Renown's quirky TV adverts are tagged online with: "WTF Japan," "giantess," and "upskirt." Just thought you may like to know that.

The first, most unadulterated Gulf Oil livery. As crispy as later iterations of this color scheme would become, many Gulf paint jobs wouldn't escape triteness. Unfortunately, sometimes classic colors breed ubiquity.

The more things change, the more Scuderia Ferrari's red stays the same. Sure, it has added some white and some orange to its paint can over the years, but every factory Ferrari race car will be red. Always. It's a fine amalgamation of color as branding and advertising as art. The subluminal bar-code advertising is brilliant, too. Classic.