Racing
© Jonathan Borba
McLaren will run a one-off heritage livery at this weekend’s British Grand Prix, replacing its usual papaya colors on the MCL40 of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri with a mostly white design inspired by the 1966 McLaren M2B, the team’s first Formula 1 car.
The Silverstone scheme carries extra weight because it returns to the race where Bruce McLaren scored the team’s first world championship point in the same season the M2B made its debut. McLaren’s first F1 car appeared at the 1966 Monaco Grand Prix, and the team has positioned the new look as a visual link between that starting point and its current challenger.
The livery was created with Google Gemini under the campaign tagline “Spark What’s Next” and will be used throughout the 3-5 July weekend at McLaren’s home race. It also extends a heritage thread the team has already leaned into this season after running a special orange-and-black scheme in Monaco to mark its 1,000th Formula 1 Grand Prix, where Mika Häkkinen drove the original M2B around the circuit.
Louise McEwen, McLaren Racing’s chief marketing officer, said in a team statement: “Our Silverstone livery is a celebration of where we began and everything we have built since.” She added: “The McLaren M2B represents the start of a journey defined by relentless innovation and a belief in possibility, and this design brings that spirit to life.”
McLaren has tied the launch to more than nostalgia. The team said its partnership with Google Gemini is already embedded in its operations, with Gemini Enterprise used to build tools that help trackside engineers search and compare sporting regulations during races. McLaren also said a natural-language interface is in development to pull data from multiple systems at the same time, framing the Silverstone livery as a marker of both its origins and the technology it sees shaping its future performance.