National Racing Colours

FB

Not my cup of cake
Valued Member
With Renault planning to revert to their traditional Yellow and Black colours in Brazil I thought it worth posting a thread on National Racing Colours. Below is a link to the wiki page which gives a full listing of the national colours each country used to have to prepare their cars in, hence British Racing Green.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_auto_racing_colors

It's a shame these colours have fallen out of use, although Honda did produced a mainly white machine before the awful "earth car" was inflicted on us, the Mild Seven Renault did at least have hint of Blue and Williams cars of years past used to have some green on them (I won't mention Ferrari as the colour they race in today is so far removed from Italian racing red it's ridiculous). I suppose you could argue McLaren are in German Silver bit it is still a British racing team and so maybe there should be some Green or, taken to It's ultimate extreme, Green and Silver for New Zealand.

My apologies if I'm being a bit "Victor Meldrew" LOL
 
It's been a great trivia debate for years about "British Racing Green". Strictly speaking any colour green will do and BRG is a bit of a myth.

It brings to mind a story I read about Mclaren at an Italian GP in the late 60's. For some reason the cars had run a previous race in red and were then shipped to Italy to take part in the Italian GP. The race stewards refused to let the cars take to the track in that colour because aside from the fact it wasn't the national colours for the team they also were the same as Ferrari. After a lot of apparently heated debate between mechanics and stewards, Mclaren resolved to paint the cars the most awful shade of green they could find. Apperently on seeing this the stewards relented and let them race in the red colour.

Also another fact about Mclaren is that they ran the at some events in 1966 in the colours of the Nakamura racing team of Japan because the car was being used to film the epic "Grandprix".

I'd quiet like to know just who chose that shade of Lilac for Egypt. Very strange ??
 
Always was a dream to paint my first car a 998cc mini in BRG

But typical teenager driving never left any spare change, after the repair bills, for a paint job let alone the twin carbs, alloys etc. I dreamt of.

Nice post, FB, if national colours where adopted today it might draw a few more fans, people always get behind their own countries teams. Regardless of where they are based!!
 
I would be fairly confident that if a car showed up in white with blue stripes or the opposite blue with white that very few if any Americans would be able to identify that as the USA colors. Quite a few of the colors seem arbitrary anyway, yellow and black for Cuba? Brown for Jordan? Gold for Mexico? An antiquated practice...
 
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