Well, we were expecting the car launch season to kick off tomorrow… but then, twenty-four hours ahead of the scheduled launch date of the 2012 Caterham car, F1 Racing magazine and the Caterham Facebook page decided to jump the gun. So here we are…

 I suppose I’m fortunate that, as a liveries blog, I only have to talk about the paint job and not the shape of the thing, because… well. Wow. Certainly, it’s not that lovely shade of green, held over from the Team Lotus days, that everyone else is going to be discussing.

Anyway, as for the livery, it’s just about as expected – arguably, even something of an anticlimax given that the changes between 2010 and 2011 were more significant than the ones between this and last year. The design is almost exactly how the car lined up at the end of last season – the only major differences being that the sidepods are now blank (that ugly swooping CATERHAM text ditched, in favour of the team’s new logo sitting on the side of the monocoque), an adjustment to the arrangement of logos on the nose stripe (note that the Renault diamond now sits on the yellow stripe rather than in a box of its own), and the angling/recolouring of the side-on race numbers.

Oh, and it’s got a Queens Park Rangers FC badge on it. Which is just weird. I know the reasons why (they’re now owned by Tony Fernandes, if you didn’t know), but it’s still weird.

Anyway, there you have it. Clearer official pictures will no doubt be on the way tomorrow, but it’s clear they won’t be hiding much of a surprise.

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