Red Bull Binning Singapore GP Custom Livery Because The Paint Is Too Heavy

The Oracle Red Bull Racing F1 team announced last night that it’s abandoning plans to run a fan-designed livery at the upcoming Singapore and US Grand Prix. The team’s REBL CUSTMS campaign is promoted as a celebration of their journey in the sport across the last 20 years and came, predictably, with a tokenised NFT-style integration dubbed the ARTFCT series.

This series of the competition ran from 30 May to 19 June with a winner expected to be announced this week. Fans were offered the opportunity to see their livery take to the racetrack along with flights, accommodation, and race tickets in exchange for signing up to Red Bull’s ‘Paddock’ fan community and submitting their entry. Here were the five options selected to be in the final voting round:

The decision to ditch the idea was driven by the ever-present motto in Formula 1 of marginal gains. Added paint means added weight and added weight equals added lap time. Any deterrence from that formula is a step in the wrong direction, no matter the accompanying protestations from the marketing department. Paint on an F1 car is estimated to weigh between 1-2kg. It’s a tiny fraction of the total weight of 798kg but arguably the most expendable of any component.

This was the justification provided by their newsletter ahead of this weekend’s race:

‘Unfortunately, when we came to the testing phase of what some REBL CUSTMS designs could look like, in real life, on the RB20, we found the paint used to create these bespoke, full car takeover liveries, added unforeseen and undue weight to the bodywork of the RB20. As I'm sure you can imagine, any additional weight compromises performance and the Team are continuing to prioritise making this car as competitive as possible for the remainder of the 2024 season.’

The theme of stripping off paint for carbon was well evident among all the teams when the liveries were first revealed in February. Aston Martin, Mercedes, McLaren, and Ferrari all embraced the trend of exposing as much carbon fibre as possible in areas where paint and sponsor logos were less visible to broadcast cameras.

Red Bull presented the first winner’s design at the British Grand Prix. The winner, Chalaj Suvanish, said afterwards ‘I can’t quite believe it; not only do I get to attend an F1 race, I get to see the car I customised on track!’. Red Bull's solution to this was instead to run the winning livery on their F1 Academy car, driven by Hamda Al Qubaisi. The winning design came from a Uragian fan named Caroline Stock and is inspired by testing livery that the team used the before the 2015 season. We have reached out to Red Bull for comment on whether the winning fan will still receive the prizes of race tickets and will update this article as and when we receive an answer.