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McLaren will show up to its home race in Silverstone with a new livery, as its car will be painted in chrome silver for the first time in ten years, as part of its 60th anniversary celebrations.
McLaren’s livery history
The team from Woking has spent a substantial part of its history in silver. After starting out life in papaya colors in the late 1960s, a deal with the Philip Morris ahead of the 1974 season meant the cars would be painted in the sponsor’s red and white colors. The deal lasted up to 1996 and produced one of the most iconic liveries in Formula 1 history, made famous by Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.
Change was about to take place in 1997, as a new sponsorship -this time with West, another tobacco company- changed the team’s main color to silver through to 2005. Then came the change to which McLaren is paying homage to.
The cars were painted in chrome silver for 2006 and the following year a substantial amount of red was added because of a new partnership with Vodafone. That era brought McLaren’s final championship, in 2008 with Lewis Hamilton, as well as plenty of victories. Hamilton debuted in 2007 and earned his first 21 victories in those colors, Fernando Alonso added four victories in his brief first stint with the team in 2007 and Jenson Button took his last eight Grand Prix wins.
McLaren only won once since that era ended, when Button emerged victorious in the 2012 Brazilian Grand Prix. In 2013, its form took a downturn and, after the deal with Vodafone ended, the chrome was replaced by a simpler shade of silver and then by black when its deal with Honda started. McLaren returned to orange, and then papaya, when Zak Brown replaced Ron Dennis at the helm of the team in 2017.
The new livery revealed
At Silverstone, the team’s home race, chrome silver is back! The color will be combined with the current shade of papaya, as it replaces a lot of the black parts of the normal livery, as you can see in the tweet below.
We’re bringing CHROME BACK. 😍
With @GoogleChrome, the MCL60 will sport the iconic Chrome livery at the #BritishGP. ✨#ChromeIsBack pic.twitter.com/xLKRxknYXr
— McLaren (@McLarenF1) July 3, 2023
Lando Norris will look to repeat his brilliant performance in Austria, which he ended up in fourth position. Oscar Piastri will hope the new upgrades -which were available to his teammate in the previous Grand Prix- will be on his car too in Silverstone, as he looks to return to the points paying positions. McLaren are sixth in the constructors’ championship, one place lower than its 2022 position.
This is McLaren’s second special livery of the year. For the Monaco and Spanish Grands Prix, McLaren ran in different colors to celebrate its unique achievement of winning all three races of the Triple Crown. The front of the car was painted in black, in tribute to the car that triumphed at the 1995 Le Mans 24 Hours. The center was painted white to honor the MP4/2, which Alain Prost drove to give McLaren its first victory at the streets of Monte Carlo in 1984. The rear end was painted papaya, like the car Johnny Rutherford took to victory in the 1974 Indianapolis 500.
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