Written by AJ Knickle, Edited by Tarun Suresh
1. Scuderia Ferrari HP: 9.5/10
This car is a phenomenal step up from last year, with no weird carbon shapes to be found. Locking up the HP logo with a white background makes the best of a not-matching situation, and the design's simplicity calls to both their Marlboro days and matches with their current Le Mans branding.
The darker shade of red also helps the white pop, while bringing a menacing sense of championship goals. The only thing that could possibly make this livery better would be a metallic or gloss finish in the red.
2. Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team: 9/10
The Aston Martin continues to be one of the best-looking cars on the grid, due to its non-matte metallic green paint, and this year, the more aggressive linework up and down the car gives it an extra flair.
The fluoro-green numbers on the revealed car add to the livery immensely, bumping this car ahead of the Alpine. With that said, the only issue I take with this car is the background on the sidepod seemingly being a dark green rather than black. This makes it seem more like a purposeless splotch than an aggressive design choice.
3. BWT Alpine F1 Team: 8.5/10
An incredible improvement from one of last year's worst looking cars, the Alpine fully leans into their French Blue colour for 2025, finally calling back to their 2021-23 liveries. The metallic paint makes this a team with a clear identity going forward, and it is hard to find anything negative to say about this car from the side.
However, from the front, the car's all-pink nose makes the car look "elongated", coupled with the pink halo, making it look a bit like a flip-flop. Ultimately this livery is an 8.5 /10, with the clear potential to be much better if the halo and front wing were left pink, but the nose were blue with the rest of the body.
4. McLaren Formula 1 Team: 8/10
This car follows the design of last year; calling back to their 1980s title challengers once more with sharp angular lines at 45 degrees up the bodywork, this time with additional chrome pieces (the colour, not brand) at the very tip of the front wing.
Unfortunately, this decision makes it look as if it's doing too many ideas at once, but not going far enough with them, making it seem needless. It's still a beautiful car though, with a clear team identity.
5. MoneyGram Haas F1 Team: 7.5/10
Haas has expanded on their identity over the last 2 years, making iterations to their design, inverting the sidepod and ultimately improving a 6/10 design last year to a 7.5 this year. The angled work that remains on the nose is a nice callback to the round bit on their car from 2016-2021, but ultimately, a matte black, matte white, and matte red car can only carry a livery so far. My main wish for Haas is that they lean into their 2018 livery once more, turning the matte white to the mean fighter-jet grey, and press on with that identity instead, giving the matte finish a purpose.
6. Oracle Red Bull Racing: 6/10
10 years on from this livery's debut, this car is still an incredibly solid livery, assumingly in the last year of its run, with Ford coming on in 2026. This livery with 2016-21 Red Bull (and Aston or Honda) branding is an 8/10 regardless of year, but as of the last 2 years, was weighed down by horrible logo integration from Bybit, and an intrusive sidepod logo from Oracle.
In 2025, the livery is raised back up to a 6/10, being kept from reaching its potential by a massive rear-wing sponsor that once again doesn't fit into the livery meaningfully. Ultimately, this livery has outstayed its welcome and could be improved greatly by designing around the logos, rather than just slapping them in white all around the car.
7. VCARB: 5/10
While it's cool to see the "White Bull" return, the design on the firesuits left me wanting more, with the clean Cash-App green leaving me expecting an iteration on last year's awesome Metallic/Chrome blue with the red swapped green.
Ultimately, this design is just the Red Bull livery with small changes, such as a blue fade on the rear with the Red Bull logo, leaving me less impressed and more asking why this idea wasn't expanded upon on the side of the nose. To add, the design retains the sharp undercut from last year's livery under the sidepod inlet, but seemingly for no reason in 2025 other than to cast an odd-looking shadow.
The red number on the rear is also borderline illegible due to the gradient. I'm left underwhelmed by a great idea rather than impressed by the execution. The white does, however, remove any confusion between themselves and Williams, so at least there’s that.
8. Williams: 4/10
This car has sadly taken much of the original idea and iterated itself into the ground in the 4 years it’s been running. Swapping the gloss blue for matte left it lacking depth, dropping the red accents has left it looking bland, and now the colour of blue has been made less vibrant. This car could do well by taking cues from the 2021’s callback to the 90s with the yellow accents and integrating them in a way similar to the 2022 and 2023 livery. Ultimately I was left disappointed by a car doing too little with great potential.
9. Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team: 3/10
Mercedes, much like Williams, is a team that has had great designs in the past, with the exact same sponsors and colours. From 2014 to 2020, we saw the Petronas swoosh integrated in a different way year after year, keeping the identity while keeping it fresh.
My main gripe is still with that swoosh – we’ve seen what they can do, with the speed lines on the 2018 car, and the glow on the 2020 car, to just have a single, flat, teal line, is boring.
With last year’s disappointing livery already being one of the more disappointing Petronas cars, partially due to the aforementioned swoosh cutting directly through the Petronas logo, making it look overly cluttered, it’s disappointing to once again see them run ultimately the same livery with no major changes.
Mercedes themselves clearly also feel the changes weren’t mentioned, as they didn’t bother releasing press shots upon reveal either.
10. Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber 2/10
You truly could not ask for a more aggressive colour palette to work with, with a menacing carbon black and vibrant energetic green. And yet, after two years, I am asking what the design team is thinking. We have gone from meaningless lines on the engine cover to the Flo-vis paint being left on, and the design team saying “good enough.”
Unfortunately, in my eyes, this car is once again incredibly underwhelming, with the team simply opting to slap a green splotch on the front of the car, not even bothering to wrap the rear in a matching black.
This leaves the light to reflect in an odd way compared to the matte wrap and leaves me asking if the car is overweight. In short, it’s not a livery that makes me expect performance.
This ultimately leaves me yearning for the Alfa Romeo liveries of the past, and waiting hopefully for Audi to pick up the pieces and make something beautiful in 2026.
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