F1 Pushes A Big Change For 2025 Affecting Every Team After Fan Complaints

Responding to fan feedback, F1 aims to resolve livery similarities by 2025.

Saudi Arabian GP / Red Bull Content Pool

Following viewer complaints about the difficulty in distinguishing F1 cars, especially during night races, the FIA is considering new measures for 2025. Initial discussions focus on altering livery designs to improve the spectator experience.

Recognizing this issue, the FIA and Formula One Management (FOM) are exploring potential changes to car liveries by 2025, spurred by feedback that cars from teams like Aston Martin, Mercedes, Williams, and Red Bull often appear similar at high speeds.

Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s head of single-seater matters, has been pivotal in raising this concern. The similarity in team car designs is increasingly seen as detrimental to the F1 viewer experience, prompting calls for distinctive and easily recognizable car appearances. Fans were clearly disappointed with the livery reveals this season with many of the teams opting for an increased amount of bare carbon fibre for weight reduction.

Whilst speaking to Motorsport.com, Tombazis explained:

“As always in F1, it is a bit more complicated than maybe meets the eye. One issue is that cars have a bit too much naked carbon, because obviously the weight of paint, so the cars have a bit too much black.

“There has also been a lot of work done by all teams to change the type of paint or indeed a lot of it nowadays is extremely thin films, to keep the weight as low as possible.

“And another issue is that some teams seem to use similar colour schemes, so they end up with cars that maybe look visually quite close to each other. We're discussing it still with the teams, and it will be discussed in the next F1 Commission.”

He added:

“We need to get to some process where teams in some way or other communicate with each other and say: ‘Well, if your car is blue here, mine will not be blue there.’ Or something like that.

“But how exactly that process would work [remains to be seen]. It's not a regulatory process. We don't want to be making regulations about liveries as the FIA, but we do want cars to be distinguishable.”

Tombazis also commented that many of the drivers helmets now have similar designs as well, making it difficult to distinguish between the two drivers in each team. He continued:

 “It used to be, of course, drivers had more recognisable helmets in the olden days because there were simpler designs. And they were like that probably for the whole career.

“Now there is a change of regulations [that allow helmet design swaps] and they've got all these funny shades, plus you don't see the helmet anyway because of the halo.

“We need to find some way to make people be able to know if it is [George] Russell or [Lewis] Hamilton, but also to be able to easily distinguish the cars.

“It's not something we want to put in a regulation and then report somebody to the stewards because the colour we don’t like,” said Tombazis.

“We don't want to get into that. But we do want to get in a place where somehow teams see it as the common good that the cars can be recognisable.”