Liveries lasting a lifetime – Top 5 Red Bull Racing liveries of F1 history
Which Red Bull Racing livery lives rent-free in your head? We’re counting down 5 iconic paint jobs that had the paddock talking and fans buzzing.
Written by Oracle Red Bull Racing
4 min readPublished on
When the RB22 is unveiled in Detroit it will be in an all-new paint job featuring the Blue Oval of Ford. It won’t be the first time we’ve made launch livery headlines, though, as a look back through the archives reveals…
The one that started it all. When a Red Bull Racing car first appeared at the end of 2004 in testing in Jerez, it was cloaked in a geometric silver and blue paint job that amounted to a pretty literal transfer of the iconic can to an F1 car. However, by the time we arrived in Melbourne for the car, team and season launch, things were quite different. Not only was pop princess Pink at the wheel of the RB1, but the car also looked markedly different, with the blocky colours replaced with a predominantly dark blue livery with silver and red pinstriping and a yellow nose cone and air intake. Sound familiar? It should do. 21 years later our racing colours remain largely unchanged. When it’s right, it’s right.
While blue has remained the predominant colour for launch liveries, there was a spell where it blended with another colour – purple. In 2011 the team, as part of its partnership with the Renault/Nissan alliance, gained branding from Nissan’s premium Infiniti marque, and at the end of 2012 it was announced that the collaboration was expanding to title sponsorship and a technical tie-up. The result? The RB11 emerged at the season launch at our Milton Keynes HQ with distinctive purple sidepods and swathes of purple across the front and rear wings and along the nose. The partnership came to an end at the close of the 2015 season and the following year’s RB12 reverted to a more traditional livery.
In the early years of the hybrid engine era, a fashion for debuting cars at the opening pre-season test took a lot of the fanfare (and the fun) out of launches. However, despite the dour times, in 2015 a little bit of trademark out-of-the-box Red Bull Racing thinking turned dull to delightful. While the opening test in Jerez saw a bunch of teams roll familiar-looking designs and colour schemes out of their garages, the RB11 did things a little differently.
Draped in a dizzying paint job of intersecting black and white lines, the rapidly christened CamoBull borrowed from the dazzle paint used to disguise prototype road cars from prying spy photographers and sent the internet wild. The fervour was short-lived as the RB11 reverted to more regular racing colours for the racing season, but a stunning, subversive template was set.
Three years after CamoBull, we unveiled another spectacular livery at the 2018 season launch. On a cold, damp February morning, the RB14 rolled out of the garages for a Silverstone shakedown that once again went viral. That was thanks to its amazing digital-effect camouflage in royal blue and black. Fans went wild for the one-off colour scheme and called for it to be made the racing livery, but 10 days later in Barcelona we went testing with a subtly revised traditional livery. DisruptoBull remains a team favourite, however, and an RB14 in this livery still graces the entrance to the MK-7 building.
The following year’s car, our first with Honda, was again paired with a Silverstone shakedown, and after the stealthy black and blue of the previous year, the RB15 was altogether hotter as it featured a startling dark blue and fiery red livery built around a sequence of chevrons on the body of the car. There’s an old adage in motorsport that if a car looks quick, it generally is quick, and that was definitely the case with the RB19. Those go-faster stripes were reflected in the pace of the car, which, with wins in Austria, Germany and Brazil, kickstarted the team’s return to title-contesting glory.
After a year of increasingly close collaboration, tech giant Oracle boosted its ties to the team by taking on title sponsorship for the 2022 campaign. The depth of the partnership was demonstrated in a ‘fan-first’ online launch that unveiled a sleek new livery with the Oracle logo splashed across the sidepods and the rear wing. The pairing proved to be massively successful with the team marching to a championship double.
