10 Potentially Beautiful F1 Cars Ruined By Minor Details

With F1 car design, performance has to come over looks, and that has often meant potentially stunning machines have been spoiled by small parts

Jack Leslie

27 Feb 2016

10 Potentially Beautiful F1 Cars Ruined By Minor Details

1. McLaren MP4-23

Controversial, I know. Lewis Hamilton’s 2008 championship-winning car could have looked absolutely brilliant late in the season, had it not been for the additional ‘bridge’ piece over the nose and the unusual wings mid-way up it.

2. Arrows A22

What’s not to love about a bright orange F1 car? The A22 was a good looking brute, up until the moment Arrows decided to chuck a bizarre mini wing on the nose. Fortunately that didn’t stay for long…

3. Ligier JS5

The JS5 is renowned for being a rather odd looking car, but imagine how cool it would have looked with a normal-sized airbox? It would have looked rather handsome, we reckon.

4. Williams FW26

The car we are looking at here is early season-spec, when Williams ran with a strange ‘walrus’ nose design. It looked odd and ruined what was a tidy looking machine. The team eventually changed to a more conventional, elegant design later in 2004.

5. McLaren MP4-29

This could be said for pretty much all 2014 cars, but it’s particularly true for the McLaren. The MP4-29 featured a sleek chrome and black livery and some elegant aero work, all of which was ruined by an unfortunate penis nose. Had McLaren gone for a design like Mercedes, the car would have looked so much better.

6. Eifelland Type 721

This car was odd for two reasons – it had one wing mirror in the middle and also a weird air intake in front of the driver. Remove these things and the car could have potentially looked pretty damn good. The weird design features didn’t really help it as the car was horribly unreliable.

7. Tyrrell P34

The P34 will go down in history as the weirdest F1 car ever made. The six wheels really made it an odd-looking thing but had the car featured four wheels, the overall aesthetic would have been much improved. Can you imagine it? Yeah, a lot better.

8. Ferrari F2012

2012 was the year of the stepped nose designs in F1 and they didn’t look great. Ferrari’s was more aggressive than others and threw off the car’s looks. Adding a vanity panel for 2013 proved what a good-looking piece of kit the F2012 could have been.

9. McLaren MP4-11

The 1996 MP4-11 was the last year of McLaren’s red and white Marlborough livery. The pointy nose looked brilliantly aggressive but the small wing – which also appeared the year before and only made a few appearances during the season – on the engine cover looked out of place and took the visual score of the car down a few pegs.

10. BMW Sauber F1.09

I really liked the look of most cars from the 2009 F1 season but something about the BMW Sauber just wasn’t right. The high, blunt front nose gave it a rather odd profile from several angles and the wide wing didn’t help matters.

These are my opinions, but what small details have put you off the look of F1 cars? Let us know in the comments!

Comments

Forgot the part where race cars were meant to place the looks of the car before potential performance enhancements.

Wouldn’t it be odd if engineers did these changes in an attempt to improve performance? As we all know, F1 cars are meant to look cool over any sort of performance design.

Dude, he said that in the introduction of the article.

They were looking for any advantage using experimental design to make the car faster. I think that makes them brilliant. It’s not a spec chassis series. I mean people think the Disco Vilante is good looking. To each their own I guess.