For 2012 I bet a black-silver-red (with much less silver than now) or a black and red livery, if Vodafone remains.

Orange is conflicting too much with Vodafone's bussiness and colour, though AFAIK the current shade of the red is coming from the McLaren 'Rocket Red', the colour of the McLaren logo. It was enough good for Vodafone, I think.

The "normal" West colour is indeed red and white - the red is much darker than the near-orange red from Marlboro, though. The "proper" West-livery was seen on Zakspeeds in from the mid-80s till the early 90s in F1. You can see a picture of one (scroll down a bit to the car of 1988) in this F1rejects page: http://www.f1rejects.com/drivers/schneider/biography.html

In other words, contrary to the Marlboro-livery (one seen on many racing cars in all kinds of formulas, including the Penskes in Indy Car that are at the frontpage at the moment) the 1997 livery was not directly taking over colours from a sponsor -certainly not from West. West styled some of its own cigarette packaging after the Mac livery, though, and a MotoGP team that was also West sponsored copied Mac's livery so the colours are now associated with West. The silver was likely there because of Mercedes, but the red is probably from the McLaren symbol as Hunnylander said. Why there was also a lot of black in it I don't know, but the result was pretty and distinctive, so it was a very good livery. Maybe McLaren will continue with red and black after Mercedes leaves.

The orange is the traditional Mclaren colour, but a fully orange racecar is not terribly attractive IMO, especially not in the traditional Mclaren shade. The testing orange used occasionally in recent years is a bit better but I still largely prefer the liveries used in actual races.

Ooooo.... A tardis pebbled-glass type debate. How could those BBC producers make all the tardis windows flat, do they take the Dr Who fans as fools!

A quote of grandprix.com from 1997

“The West McLaren Mercedes Benz team had a "sneak preview" of its new 1997 car at its factory in Woking early on the morning of January 14. The prototype McLaren-Mercedes MP4-12 was unveiled in an orange and black livery - the color used on the old McLaren CanAm cars of the 1960s - but will be raced in a silver color-scheme this year. Silver is, of course, the traditional racing livery of Mercedes-Benz, but it is also the color used by the Germany West cigarette brand - the team's new title sponsor - for its West Lights packaging. The team wanted to get as much testing achieved as possible and so the McLaren sponsorship package will be revealed separately at a major launch in London's Alexandra Palace exhibition centre on February 14. The team says it is expecting to have 4000 people present for the event.”


Link-> The new McLaren's MP4-12

OK. Even so, before 1997 all West sponsorship in autosport was apparently in red-and-white. Grey is but one of many colours they use. Doesn't Marlboro also have light grey "light" packaging for cigarettes? Yet their "racing cigarette packages" like the Penskes always use orange/red and white. The grey colour is much more strongly associated with Mercedes than with West.

BREAKING NEWS:

New picture of the 2010 car livery:



As you can see, it's all perfectly transparent. Safety dispute will surely follow...

Can we move things on from the whole livery debate? Silver and Rocket Red is locked down, so there's not much to discuss I would have thought.
No offence folks

A few interesting figures (poched from the renault dissc) from F1numbers regarding fuel consumption, the interesting bit is the difference between manufacture and customer.
Macca are in a good place tho.








...

I read those graphs in the renault thread and I found something curious.

The Renault engine is a lot more economical then the Merc
but
The mclaren is as economical as the Renault and much more then the Brawn and FI

Is this Kers or something else?

And if it is kers, then that means an advantage is doubly lost next year.

Well Ferrari had Kers and the car was as thirsty as hell.

If it is jusk KERS, Ferrari are in deep sh!t. Force India consumed less fuel than Brawn GP and neither of them used KERS.
I think Renault used KERS for a while last year so this may have influenced the yearly average for them. RB didn't seem to have benefitted much from the advantage Renault engine was supposed to offer in terms of fuel usage though. So I don't think it is just KERS. We should also remember that KERS has aerodynamic overhead as well...

Not as thirsty as the torro rosso though so it still helped, it just so happened to come from a higher starting point.

Anyone care to offer-up a technical reason for the systematic discrepency between factory and customer fuel-consumption?

(It's not even less developed customer cars needing to turn the wick up to compensate ... the RedBull Renault appears thirstier than the Renault Renault)

As for efficiency versus power, with 2010 qualifying regulations, there is only one sensible choice to make there. There will be only vapours in the tanks for Q3, so the relative difference in consumption will be a few teaspoons ... irrelevant, but the extra power will lock out the front of the grid. Those guys on an efficiency drive will have lost too much track position by the time it all unfolds, and with no refueling, it's the guy who pits first for tyres that now has the advantage.

Well, eventhough Rino and RedBull had the same engine, they had very different chassis in terms of competitivety.
Being a much better chassis, RB could brake later and accelerate earlier.
Therefore, RBull full throttle usage [percentage] would be higher than Rino's.
This is a very important KPI [Key Performance Indicator] for F1 teams.

About Toyota vs Mercedes, I noted in Interlagos [Kobayashi vs Jenson] that Merceds peak power was much higher than Toyotas, as Jenson could close the gap to Koba very easily at the end of the long pit straigh up hill.
So Mercedes is more powerfull, therefore consumes more.

That depends. Partly on how close the field is.

If a driver pits while the field is still closely bunched behind him, he could lose a lot of positions. Those who leave it until later, when the field is more spread out, will lose less positions.

Some drivers may take it very easy (and rather slowly) to make just one tyre stop near the end of the race. Anyone who gets stuck behind could be in trouble if they can't make their tyres last.

The Brawn was generally faster than the McLaren, so by that reasoning it uses more fuel, but the Force India is using the same as the Brawn, and it wasn't faster than the Mc, but both are identically much, much thirstier than the Mercedes factory team.

The Toro Rosso is slower than a Ferrari, but it uses more fuel?
The Red Bull is faster than a Renault, but it uses more fuel?
The Williams is about the same as a Toyota, but it uses more fuel?

There is no pattern to the performance vs consumption argument, slower cars, faster cars, doesn't matter, the only consistent pattern is customer engines are thirsty, and their identical factory versions are much more economical. We'd need to go deep, and look at the actual races, and try to really figure out what's going on, but for now, it's certainly a curious looking pattern to the graph.

Orange would be fine, but really the chrome look is now "McLaren" as far as I'm concerned. It embodies their vibe best, IMO.

A mixture of the two could be sweet

Maybe engine cooling is also a factor. If you run your engine lean it will get hot.

I'm not an engineer by any means but I think ONE of the reasons may be because the engines are designed around the factory teams (obviously), so the factory teams, then design their gearboxes according to the engine. The customer teams, however, have to make their already existing gearboxes work with whatever engine they are provided with. I am sure that has quite a significant effect on efficiency.

I wouldnt think so because we supply Force India with entire drivetrains (engine+gearbox+hydraulics) so there shouldnt be any diference there. The only thing i can think of is that the works teams gather significantly 'more data' from the engines and 'drivetrain' so they know how to optimise the performans. (would the type of lubrication used and diferent cooling mechanism + operating tempretures have anything to do with it maybe?)

Just 12 more hours and Jenson Button will be finaly, officialy driver of Vodafone McLaren Mercedes

Indeed. The all British line up will be a reality.

Nice. Cheers. Had to laugh when I saw it pound round the Top Gear track, half expected the Stig to be driving!

The fuel economy may well change next year anyway. On the Renault thread, it is being reported that Renault and Ferrari (and probably the other manufacturers, too) are working on revised air intakes which would (apparently) reduce fuel consumption. So, engine freeze or not, some changes are apparently possible and the figures from 2009 may not apply.

Also interesting and reported in the Renault thread: Renault is planning to have the ride height adjustable during the race. During a pitstop, mechanics should be able to adapt the ride height to compensate for the fuel lost from the start. I hope McLaren (and Mercedes, in my case, as well as I support both) have also thought of that. It seems Newey isn't sure this is legal so Red Bull may not have it, much like with the double decker diffuser.

Dick Glover?

Does anyone here like fish sticks?

Being now practically a customer and a big rival of Mercedes, I think our engines won't be as frugal as those in the Mercedes works cars. Also because of the development relating to air intakes needs a strong cooperation with the engine manufacturer, I don't see too much chance a similar thing for the MP4-25. Maybe the McLaren engineers may find out such things on their own, but I think Mercedes is free not to share its chassis-engine related development tricks. So to reduce fuel consumption is much easier for factory teams. So we just get the 2nd-3rd grade engines.*

From those statistics made by f1numbers, it's clear the customers' engines were less frugal already in 2009.

So there is a big chance the McLarens have to start heavier. I hope Lewis and Jenson will be able to compensate the handicap.

*1st grade engines selected for Mercedes, 2nd grade selected for FI, 3rd grade for McLaren in the worst scenario. Engines are not perfectly identical, there is a spread between them in power and fuel consumption and they are measured and selected. Till this year we got the best ones, now we must forget that privilege.

I don't think there is any evidence for something like that happening and even if there was I'm sure that would have being discussed in the split talks. Least we forget, Mercedes still own 40% off McLaren, they are still therefore a factory team.

McLaren is also still racing in Mercedes colours, so a victory for them is still good for Mercedes - unless their factory team is the most important opponent of McLaren. But if it turns out Red Bull and McLaren or Ferrari and McLaren are way ahead of Mercedes GP, Mercedes still has every interest in having McLaren win over the others.

The best way to analyze this is to measure Renaults fuel consumption in the later half of the year when they did not run Kers and compare it to the earlier part of the year when they ran Kers.

Or it could be due to as said, customer car vs factory teams.

If that was the difference then it would have to be with ancillary setup differences as the engine itself should be the same unit.

Be interesting to hear the truth of it all, as next year going by those figures the Renault should be storming.

Yes I am thinking set up differences, Reanults edge might rightly have an edge and I may be wrong but I think they had stopped developing the 09 car and had been working on the 2010 car mid way through the year. They might just one of the top 3 dominant cars for 2010. Testing could not come sooner. 2010 is alot more promising than 2009.

TheFifthDriver
http://twitpic.com/w7g2w - EXCLUSIVE FIRST PEEK: #jenson button in 2010 #vodafone #mclaren #mercedes team kit!

Jenson Button New Year Message

Waiting desperately for the car launch date. According to Whitmarsh its going to be a radical design. Maybe we wont be launching the car in January then?

I think no, we need media attention, especially after the Mercedes-MS-hype. I guess mid January for both McLaren and Ferrari. They use to launch early for attention/marketing and power demonstration reasons.

New car will be presented just before testing begins, no need to show your car earlier.

A couple of others with provenance:

Is MP4-25 on background of this scene?

Private test can happen even in January, AFAIK. Last year McLaren tested in January.

New team shirts are horrible.Looks like a cheap polo shirt.

Nope, it's a 24

I prefer them.

last year is last year, now testing is banned and there is no point showing your car one month before testing.

It seems a less shiny silver, greyish. A bit frowzy on Button on that picture. I wonder what Mercedes will choose, silver, dark grey, black?

Out of comfort or aesthetics?

Much more comfortable, apparently made form bamboo, which is environmentally friendly if you're into that sort of thing.

Silver and black I think.

Nice. I love bamboo things. (It's a grass, growing extremely fast, no forests are eradicated for it.)

When it comes to mclaren why does this not surprise me haha