Mercedes's New F1 Car Is Black to Save Weight
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For decades, Mercedes's race cars have been known as the Silver Arrows in reference to their color. The original Silver Arrows from way back when not painted silver, the paint was taken off and the cars were bare metal, a way to reduce weight that ended up being functionally beautiful.
In the decades since and as construction techniques shifted to carbon fiber, which is black, Mercedes racing cars have been painted silver in reference to that nickname. In 2020 and 2021, though, the Mercedes-AMG F1 team's cars were painted black. Toto Wolff, the team principal, gives the reasoning:
When we changed the livery in 2020 the main driving factor was to support the diversity and equality causes which are always close to our heart. The color black became part of our DNA at that point.
For 2023, the cars will be black once again, and this time it's both to support those causes and an homage to the original Silver Arrows:
When you look at where the story of the Silver Arrows came from, it's that the Mercedes was put on track – the race car it was white, overweight, a little bit of our story last year – and they scratched off the paint, and it ended up with bare aluminum, and the car made the weight.
So we came back, we really tried to get the weight off the car in every single bit and therefore on the paint side we committed in gaining the grams by leaving the car matte carbon, and history repeats itself. Just in this case it's a modern material, carbon, and not aluminum, and it's black.
Mercedes isn't the only team that has increased the amount of bare carbon in its livery in the quest to reduce weight wherever possible, with many others on the grid reducing liveries to more minimalist interpretations in order to get overweight cars down to the limit. Last year, Williams was seemingly stripping parts of its livery off every race.
As for the rest of the car, it's tough to judge something in its reveal spec. The 2022 car, the W13, debuted with traditional sidepods, and then, in testing, the ultra-slim sidepods appeared. This car has those narrow sidepods, but that's subject to change. We'll see it testing next week when more should become clear.
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