The plague is upon us once again. The livery gods have decided to be cruel and update their gray-white-red livery scheme to black-white-red for Formula E’s sixth season. Seriously. Two-thirds of all the colors on Formula E cars this season are black, white, or red. Has the entire series forgotten that other colors exist?
I must admit that I was not the one to crunch these numbers. That accolade goes to lookingspiffy on Twitter, who went out of her way to calculate some pie charts for us that show exactly how stupidly similar all the FE liveries have become.
Seriously. This is painful:
Half of the teams on the grid are using white as their base color! Over 90 percent of teams are using a form of grayscale! Don’t you people have a single excited bone left in your body? Have you all forgotten how to dream????
As if that weren’t enough, black, red and silver compose over half of all cars’ secondary colors, with black, red, and white composing almost 78 percent of the tertiary colors. The total of all colors on the cars looks even sadder:
Not to go all rose-colored glasses nostalgia on you, but I remember the first season of Formula E, where you could find just about every color of the rainbow in the paddock. There were oranges, greens, yellows, multiple shades of blue! Back then, we all thought everyone was going to get tired of blue and silver/white liveries because it was supposed to represent electricity!
That’s not to say there aren’t any cool liveries this season. Nissan’s kimono-style livery is pretty damn handsome, a great way to channel the marque’s Japanese heritage. The BMW i Andretti livery stands out because it’s so bright.
Honestly, I can’t see what the appeal is with choosing the same livery colors as everyone else. Everything ends up looking the same, no matter how hard you try to be different! Stop being boring corporate shills and try using the ol’ imagination—I am sure the results will be preferable to... this.