Ahead of this weekend’s Turkish Grand Prix, Red Bull has teased a special white livery for their normally dark blue car. The livery pays tribute to Honda, their engine manufacturer, who will be departing from Formula 1 at the end of this season.
There aren’t any official images of the whole car yet, but the team teased a white nose cone with red Red Bull decals in a video posted to their Twitter account with the caption “Something’s looking a little different… “. The special white color scheme is said to pay tribute to the RA272, Honda‘s first F1 car to win a race, which would be a fitting sendoff to the Japanese manufacturer.
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Something's looking a little different… ありがとう @HondaRacingF1 🤍 pic.twitter.com/44GUwHHvrl
— Oracle Red Bull Racing (@redbullracing) October 6, 2021
Additionally, AlphaTauri, Red Bull’s sister team, will also be running a special livery, although it’s unclear as to exactly what it will look like. What we do know, though, is that the black rear wing in the video that reads “ありがとう” (“arigato”, which is Japanese for “thank you”) is expected to be featured on the car.
And as for why these special liveries are being used for the Turkish Grand Prix of all races, this weekend was originally supposed to be the Japanese Grand Prix before it was cancelled, meaning they would have been run on Honda’s home turf. Nevertheless, the white Red Bull will certainly be a change rom their usual livery, which has remained more or less the same since 2016, though the team is no stranger to one-offs. In fact, the ones they’ve done in the past have been some of the best in the sport, such as the Star Wars livery in 2005, the blue camo “Special Edition” from the 2018 Silverstone shakedown, and another white livery they did back in 2008 for David Coulthard’s final Grand Prix.
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“We had all been looking forward to giving Honda’s Japanese fans a chance to celebrate our extremely successful relationship in Formula One, on home soil at Suzuka,” said Red Bull team principal Christian Horner.”With the race falling victim to the pandemic, we just couldn’t let the weekend pass without paying tribute to Honda and its amazing home fans by bringing a little bit of its heritage to Istanbul. The livery chosen for our cars pays homage to Honda’s remarkable F1 journey and hopefully we can give fans another victory in those legendary colors this weekend.”