How did McLaren use ships from the world wars to come up with a disruptive one-off livery?
Last Thursday, the British outfit became the first team to reveal its car ahead of the upcoming 2025 F1 season, showing off its MCL39 at Silverstone Circuit as it took to track for the first time sporting a striking geometric camo design in shades of papaya and black.
With Formula One set to stage its inaugural launch event in London on February 18, teams that have already shown off their new car - McLaren and Williams - were forced to use an interim colour scheme.
McLaren opted for a papaya-coloured camouflage livery. The British outfits could have used last year’s livery, or could have sent out a car without any wrapping at all, but both would have made it easy to spot any changes to the car’s design. Running without a livery would have made it easy to analyse the car, whilst an older one would have led to side-by-side comparisons.
So instead, the reignng world champion outfit created a one-off papaya-coloured camouflage wrap for the new car. “We just tried to have fun with it, we wanted to be disruptive,” says Creative Director Ed Sullivan. “But essentially, it’s a performance-based wrap to hide the shapes of the car.”
“It's what they call dazzle camouflage,” Design Senior Specialist Simon Dibley adds.
Dazzle camouflage dates back to the First and Second World Wars, when it was used as a paint scheme on ships by the navy because it made it difficult to judge their speed, size and in what direction they were heading. A form of this has since been adopted by F1 as a way to mask elements of a car’s design.
Sullivan and Dibley worked closely with the Vehicle Design/Aero teams on the design of the camo livery, aligning on which areas of the car were most sensitive and the most effective way of obscuring them. The materials used were also tested by Surface & Brand to make sure the print and application of the vinyl wouldn’t impact performance.
"It will hopefully confuse people," says Ed. "Diverting attention away from our car’s actual performance areas."
The geometric pattern used on the MCL39, and its placement, distort the car's appearance, reducing its contrast and making the edges and curves difficult to capture on a camera and challenging for the naked eye to identify properly.
As for the design phase, McLaren noted that "every section of the car, including the rear wing, the front wing, the nose and everything in between, has been individually designed and mapped out, as opposed to the team creating the design first and fitting it to the car afterwards."
To further complicate things, each side of the car is different, instead of the two sides being symmetrical, as they normally would be. Again, making it harder to pick out individual elements because the car looks different from every angle.
