Red Bull has been made to abandon its plans to adopt special liveries at the Singapore and United States Grands Prix as part of weight-saving measures in Formula 1.
To celebrate the team’s 20th season competing in the sport, Red Bull opened a competition which handed fans the chance to design the team’s liveries at three races.
But while a bespoke design was used at the British Grand Prix, Red Bull’s dramatic regression has seen it ditch plans to run revised schemes in Singapore and Austin.
READ MORE: Mercedes unveils one-off livery for Singapore to celebrate Petronas
Red Bull hasn’t won during the last six races amid increasing balance issues with the RB20 and surrendered the Constructors’ Championship lead to McLaren in Baku.
The six-time F1 champions trail 20 points behind the Woking-based squad and could even drop to third place with Ferrari 31 points back with seven rounds remaining.
“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,” Red Bull said.
“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.
“As a result, it is with a heavy heart that we must let you know the team has made the decision to not run the REBL CUSTMS liveries on the RB20 at the Singapore and United States GPs.”
FIA to discuss increased exposed carbon on F1 liveries
The increased weight of the current generation cars has seen more exposed carbon prevalent on cars in recent times as sides strive to find marginal gains over rivals.
However, the FIA is planning to hold talks with F1 teams over the potential to have more separable liveries in 2025 to counter the growing trend of similar-looking cars.
“One issue is that cars have a bit too much naked carbon, obviously because of the weight of paint, so the cars have a bit too much black,” the FIA’s Head of Single-Seater Matters Nikolas Tombazis told Autosport.
“There has also been a lot of work done by all teams to change the type of paint, or indeed a lot of it nowadays is extremely thin films, to keep the weight as low as possible.”
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