Formula One’s preseason officially kicks off this week with three days of testing at the Bahrain International Circuit, but all 10 teams have already unveiled their cars to the world over the past few weeks.
We saw a handful of big ‘season’ launches, as they appear now to be known — some executed better than others — and a few low-key events. Some liveries really caught the eye while others left fans feeling a little deflated.
Ferrari raises the bar
Ferrari absolutely nailed their launch. Live crowd – check. Famous backdrop – check. An actual car on track – check. The Italian team pulled out all the stops for its curtain-raising event and managed to get the feel-good factor spot on after what was a deflating 2022 season, one which finished with team boss Mattia Binotto leaving the team.
Ferrari leant into its heritage, using the hallowed ground around its headquarters at Maranello and its Fiorano test facility to take the SF-23 on track for the first time after a vibrant launch event, which started with an orchestral version of the rousing Italian national anthem and then saw both drivers given a hero’s welcome by a grandstand of tifosi as they were brought onto the stage.
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On top of it all, the small livery changes Ferrari made were spot on – the team’s name is now written in white across its rear wing.
Of course, a car livery or a launch event mean nothing in the grand scheme of a competitive season. Whether the SF-23 is the car to end Ferrari’s long wait for a championship will remain one of the biggest talking points of the next few weeks and months.
Zizou to Alpine
While Alpine’s televised launch in a soon-to-be-demolished London nightclub venue was fairly conventional, it did have one genuine ‘wow’ moment – the introduction of French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane as the team’s new ambassador. Zidane’s fee is likely not as high as it would have been in the late 1990s and early 2000s when he was one of the game’s best players, but his fame has not diminished.
Alpine has an all-French driver lineup this year, with new signing Pierre Gasly joining Esteban Ocon – both were excited to have been able to share the stage with a national hero.
“Unbelievable,” Ocon would say later of Zidane’s presence. “For you guys he’s an icon, for us, he’s everything.
“Now he’s going to be able to share his expertise with us as sportsman but also team leader, his success as [France captain] was unbelievable. You realise how much of a step up this team has done and when you have someone like Zidane next to you giving you advice, it’s a big boost to the team”.
Gasly, who laughed when told he was only the second most famous No. 10 in the building, added: “He’s a legend, an icon. Very cool he was here.”
After the launch, Jamie XX played a DJ set in the upstairs nightclub area, where an Alpine car was suspended above the dance floor, occasionally lit up by strobe lighting.
While Zidane’s star power is hard to beat, McLaren went for a different kind of big name to kick off their season, with YouTube personality and Sidemen member Vikkstar123 co-hosting their launch event with F1’s Arianna Bravo.
Red Bull falls flat Stateside
Fans were disappointed with how the Red Bull teams launched their new seasons, despite both going in completely opposite directions. Red Bull launched both its cars in The Big Apple — the senior team at Manhattan’s Classic Car Club, while AlphaTauri launched as part of fashion week.
Red Bull’s headline launch was centered around the announcement of its 2026 partnership with Ford, which felt like the main event, but the long and drawn out wait to reveal what was an unchanged livery for 2023 left those watching frustrated — even though Red Bull’s existing scheme is one of the best on the current grid.
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The Manhattan event also featured a bizarre moment where Stefano Domenicali was introduced on stage, only for F1’s CEO not to appear – despite the fact he was in the building, having flown in with Red Bull boss Christian Horner the day before. F1 explained Domenicali had not wanted to show favouritsm by appearing on stage during Red Bull’s Ford announcement, but his failure to show just added to the chaotic feeling of the whole show.
Whether fans liked the show itself or not, Red Bull’s decision to host in America was just another indication of F1’s booming popularity Stateside and it was great to see a team think outside the box for this type of launch event, which would ordinarily have been held somewhere in the UK.
AlphaTauri’s launch was on the opposite end of the time scale, with the team showing a quick flash of its car, flanked by Yuki Tsunoda and his rookie teammate Nyck de Vries, before the feed ended almost as quickly as it had started.
Where’s all the paint gone?
One notable feature of all liveries this year is how many cars feature large areas of black on them, where teams have stripped back the paint to the bare carbon fibre underneath. With car weight a crucial consideration under the new regulations teams are looking to make savings wherever they can.
Mercedes’ return to an all-black look was the most notable example of weight saving, but Alfa Romeo also took a lot of paintwork off its stunning C43.
Some fans voiced concern about whether black would feature more and more on cars going forward, although it is unlikely to get much more extreme than for this year.
“I think there’s a limit to that,” Alpine technical boss Matt Harman said about the paint stripping. “The cars need to look good and they need to look good for our sponsors.
“We’ve reached a limit now, we wouldn’t go any further. I think we’d start looking at different paint technologies, we’ve got some good partners there and we’d look at that next and see if there’s something we can do there instead of just taking paint off the car”.
Are there any radical new car designs?
It’s always tough to read into car launches, as the vehicles which roll out on the opening morning are often vastly different to what the media and public are shown in the fortnight or so beforehand. Red Bull unveiled their “new” car in early February, but it was not the true car it will defend both F1 titles with this year. The Milton Keynes-based team is notorious for aggressively updating the car at this time of year and the design will be keenly analysed when it rolls out of the garage on the first day of preseason testing.
One team made headlines for the fact they didn’t have a radical new design, with Mercedes confirming at its launch it was sticking with the ‘zero sidepod’ concept which garnered so much attention last season. The car looked strikingly different to any other design or concept on the grid and Mercedes spent a large part of the season trying to tame its fast but erratic car. The former world champions did seem to be getting a handle on things at the end of the year and clearly comes into 2023 feeling invigorated in the belief it can return to title contention this season.
Will the stripped-back Mercedes take the team back to the front?
“I don’t believe we’ve ever been a team that copied other people,” Lewis Hamilton said at the launch. “We’ve always been of our own mind and always been a team that’s incredibly creative and innovative and like to do it our way. I think that’s worked in the past.”
Mercedes customer Aston Martin went the other way, with technical director Dan Fallows saying the 2023 version is 90 percent different to its 2022 predecessor. Fallows joined from Red Bull last year and it is perhaps not surprising that the AMR23 looks strikingly similar to the world championship winning car from late last year, although it is also not uncommon for car designs to converge around the benchmark team in Formula One.