As the various teams prepare to get pre-season testing underway tomorrow, the weekend has seen a deluge of new car launches and livery reveals. So let’s deal first of all with the three existing teams, who’ve given us liveries that are to varying degrees fairly straightforward evolutions of what they had last year.

First up it’s McLaren, who it’s fair to say we’ve given a significant amount of stick to for their liveries ever since their Vodafone deal ended. But this 2016 effort… well, it’s certainly the best they’ve had since the chrome job went away:

It is, essentially, the same basic design as their second 2015 livery, but with a few tweaks that on the whole improve it – that annoying nose stripe is gone, and the bigger race numbers on the lower part of the nose are certainly to be welcomed. It’s smart and tidy, and I like the “graphite” shade of black/grey.

You still get the sense that Ron Dennis feels like livery designs and sponsorship are something that should happen to other teams, not his. But if we accept that we’re never going to get either a white/red Marlboro homage nor an orange McLaren ever again, then this is an ongoing team identity that’s much easier to get behind than the terribly bland silver and black that preceded it. Certainly, if they’d launched with this back at the start of 2014, I think we’d all have been a lot more favourable about it and them. Can they give us some more interesting team uniforms to go with it, though?

On to Mercedes, then, who unsurprisingly stick with the silver-with-black-and-turquoise that’s served them so well so far. Again, though, this might be the best implementation of it that they’ve yet had:

I’ve never felt that the black background on the airbox/engine cover was incredibly necessary, but the way it’s painted here is better than before; and I really like the way the turquoise now extends from the sidepod out onto the monocoque. The black rear wing endplate, too, seems to unify the design a bit better. Once again, there’s absolutely no red sponsorship on the car any more – though I suspect they will probably stick with the red race numbers, as they stand out quite well.

And finally, we come to Williams, who unsurprisingly have made basically no tweaks whatsoever to their 2015 livery, despite some minor changes in sponsorship placement:

 So yeah, nothing to say about this really, other than that it’s still very nice, but still a little bit conservative. Maybe next year they could shake it up with a bit more blue or red or something?

And of course, we’ve had another team launch their car today… but we’ll have more on that one a bit later.

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