Of all the car brands that have had major international motorsport programmes, Porsche must be the one with the most brilliant variety of colourschemes on offer. From the famous Rothmans liveries to New Man we’ve covered our favourites before a couple of times, but here at Rennsport we’ve found some left-field options that we think might deserve a spot at the very top.
Its been a few years since we were last in close contact with a car from the Flying Lizard Racing team. It’s not often seen at the top of the sportscar ladder any more having moved from factory GTE team, to customer team and headed off to more fruitful pursuits out and about in the US racing world. But seeing the classic silver and red of the team’s livery is always guaranteed to put a smile on your face. Sadly we’re not here with the incredible lacquered vivid orange and blue cars of the early 2010s, but Flying Lizard’s more standard spec. But to us, that still looks great.
Purple, pink and orange. Not a trio of colours you often expect to hear put together, and especially not when talking about the colour scheme of a racing car. Wynn’s has sponsored racing cars for decades now, and still does in IMSA today, but here at Rennsport we have two different, and both awesome, Wynn’s liveries from the 1980s from which to pick. I guess we’re saying which do you prefer, the all purple one or the one with splashes of all three Wynn’s colour alongside some white. We’re happy with both, they are great.
Not a sponsorship name you first associate with car racing. Repsol means Honda motorbikes right? Well, not always. You probably remember Repsol sponsorship following Pedro de la Rosa around for part of his career, but when he was just a little kid Brun racing was fighting for the World Sportscar Championship in this Repsol-liveried Porsche 962. And we think it fits a sportscar just as well as a MotoGP machine.
F.A.T. International, must have been a company that made bits for cars right? Wrong. In fact, it was a French haulage company that fancied getting into motorsport. It sponsored some of Porsche’s finest racing cars. And it picked well, sponsoring a 962 and then, at its height, the 1994 Le Mans winning Dauer 962. The original company no longer exists, although the brand has been refounded as a multifaceted part of automotive culture. But the liveries, clean with red, white and some green, look fantastic.
Moving away from high spending corporate branding, sometimes simplicity is the real answer. And what could be simpler than manufacturing your livery out of… tape. Yes, common or garden duct tape is the reason why this Porsche 910 looks so distinctive. There’s a decent layer of yellow paint underneath and then stripes and stripes of black tape. It’s like a bee, or perhaps more like a wasp, but we’re not put off, and you certainly won’t miss it, even though the California weather has taken a turn to the colder end of the scale.
Fewer organisations in history have mastered marketing and branding better than a certain beverage maker from Atlanta, Georgia. So of course Coca-Cola found a way to make its branding fit well onto Porsche’s racing cars. In the 1980s Coca-Cola was a regular sponsor seen on IMSA competition cars from GTP down through to the GT ranks. A recognisable logo with just two colours, it stands out in every situation.
You were waiting for this one. Gulf and Porsche, a mixture that just seems to work. And yes Gulf has been seen on many other brands of racing car, but none of the rest were able to throw Steve McQueen into the mix were they? So it’s the era of the 908 and 917 for which we remember these colours best.
But for me it’s the colours of Brumos racing that come out top, especially as we are here in the United States. Brumos raced Porsches for decades, blessing them with a simple livery of white at the base, with a single, thick, stripe each of red and blue down the middle. From 935s to 911s, Can-Am cars to GTs Brumos campaigned everything from Porsche, winning the Daytona 24 Hours three times. In an era when liveries are getting more and more complicated, the simplicity of Brumos stands the test of time.
Photography by Pete Summers and Ben Miles.
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