The first time this happened was in the Gordon Bennett Cup races, held annually between 1900 and 1905. Count Eliot Zborowski suggested the scheme and colours were allotted; blue for France, yellow for Belgium, white for Germany and red for the United States. Great Britain entered racing in 1902 but was unable to use any of the colours of its national flag – red, white or blue – as they had already been allocated. When a Napier car won the Gordon Bennett race in that year, it was painted olive green, which was coincidentally a well-established colour for locomotives and other heavy industrial machinery, in which Great Britain at that time led the world.
When Great Britain hosted the 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup race, the British teams adopted Shamrock Green as their racing colour, which would evolve into British Racing Green in the years that followed. Italy adopted its famous ‘racing red’ after a red-painted FIAT won the second Grand Prix race in 1907, by which time American drivers and manufacturers had largely confined itself to racing on home soil.
Through the 1920s, French blue and Italian red dominated Grand Prix racing, while green Bentleys dominated the Le Mans Grand Prix D’Endurance in the same period. Into the 1930s, the German teams of Auto Union and Mercedes Benz dominated Grand Prix racing as no nation had done to that point. White was the German racing colour and so, when the Mercedes Benz W25 appeared for the first race in 1935, it was painted white. However, when it was being weighed prior to the first practice, it was slightly over the 750kg maximum weight limit. Overnight, the mechanics stripped the white paint off the aluminium bodywork, bringing the weight just under the 750kg limit. The press nicknamed the cars the Silver Arrows and, from that point onwards, Mercedes Benz cars raced in silver.
After the Second World War, racing resumed sporadically using pre-war cars, before the World Championship was formed for the 1950 season onwards. Italian teams dominated at first – either Alfa Romeo, Maserati or Ferrari – before first Mercedes Benz and then the British teams of Vanwall, Cooper and Lotus took over. Still the cars were painted in their national colours.
Then, in 1968, Colin Chapman, that startling engineering innovator, made his next bold move, when his Type 49 grand Prix cars appeared not in British Racing Green, but in the colours of the John Players cigarette brand, Gold Leaf, which were bright red and gold.
Cries of ‘heresy’ were to be heard amongst the purists but, in fact, Chapman had found a solution to the problem of the ever-increasing costs of developing racing cars: sponsorship. In return for giving the sponsor a moving billboard, Chapman got plenty of money to help support his business of designing racing cars and going racing, something that his road car business wasn’t able to do.
Following Chapman’s lead, every team in Formula One – and every other racing series – adopted the principle of getting someone else to pay for their racing and, before long, every car on the grid looked like a mobile ‘fag packet,’ for it was the tobacco companies that had the most money to spend and were, through to the mid-2000s, the primary sponsors of motor sport.
National racing colours were a thing of the past, swept aside by commercial interests: nationalism had given way to finance. Not that it was entirely a bad thing; there have been many memorable colour schemes throughout the sponsorship era: Yardley McLaren; John Player Special Team Lotus, resplendent in black and gold; Marlboro McLaren’s Day-Glo red and white; Camel Team Lotus’ bright yellow; Parmalat Brabham; Canon Williams Honda. Only Ferrari has remained red, although you can guarantee that sponsor dollars were well accounted for, despite this.
Having said that, of all the national racing colours, British Racing Green remains the best-known after Italian red, even though few modern cars are painted that colour. Nostalgia is a powerful drug.
