A German name on a British team with a long chain of owners.

The Mercedes Formula One team is a German brand on an English site. English Wikipedia says the company behind it, Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Limited, competes as the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, is based in Brackley, England, and holds a German racing licence. The entry itself has passed through several hands. Wikipedia traces it to Tyrrell Racing, bought by British American Tobacco at the end of 1997 so that its place could pass to the new British American Racing team in 1999; that team became Honda Racing F1 Team in 2006, and when Honda withdrew in 2008 its management bought it and named it Brawn GP after team principal Ross Brawn.

Mercedes arrived a year later. Sky Sports reported on 16 November 2009 that Mercedes-Benz had taken over Brawn GP and that the team would be known as Mercedes Grand Prix. It quoted a statement saying that Daimler AG, together with Aabar Investments of Abu Dhabi, would take a controlling interest, that Ross Brawn was expected to remain in charge, and that Daimler and the McLaren Group would change their form of cooperation from 13 November 2009. Mercedes had been supplying Brawn’s engines that season. Wikipedia says Daimler and Aabar bought the remaining shares held by the team’s management in February 2011.

Ownership has shifted again since. Wikipedia says an announcement in December 2020 set out that INEOS would take an equal one-third stake alongside the Mercedes-Benz Group and team principal Toto Wolff, and that this took effect on 25 January 2022.

The engines come from a separate site. Wikipedia says the Formula One power units are built at Brixworth, Northamptonshire, by the former Ilmor Engineering business, renamed Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains in 2005, close to the Brackley chassis factory. For the road-car brand behind the name, see our Mercedes-Benz guide.

Silver by tradition, teal by contract.

The team’s nickname is older than the team. Wikipedia says Mercedes-branded teams are often called the Silver Arrows, in German Silberpfeile, a name that goes back to the Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix cars of the 1930s. The marque entered Formula One itself in 1954 as Daimler-Benz AG, running its cars from Stuttgart for the 1954 and 1955 seasons. Wikipedia’s results table shows no Mercedes constructor entry between 1956 and 2009.

When Mercedes returned as a team owner, it went back to that colour. Wikipedia says the 2010 car’s livery was unveiled at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and that the cars raced in the traditional silver colours of Mercedes-Benz. The silver was joined by a partner colour. Wikipedia says the Malaysian energy company Petronas, based in Kuala Lumpur, joined as title sponsor, and from 2010 the team competed as Mercedes GP Petronas Formula One Team. In our palette, Petronas’s corporate colour is read as a teal-green set against silver; the team publishes no hex value for it.

The name was then tightened. Wikipedia says that for 2012 the team dropped the “GP” from its name and added AMG, the performance brand of Daimler AG, giving Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team. That put the road-car performance label into the team’s title, linking the race entry to the cars sold in showrooms. Wikipedia also records that Mercedes and Petronas announced on 28 September 2022 a multi-year renewal of their title and technical partnership from the 2026 season onwards, so the teal is set to remain on the car.

Other partners have changed around that fixed pair. Wikipedia lists names such as BlackBerry, Monster Energy, Puma and UBS among the team’s partners during the 2010s, each fitted into a livery whose base colour and title partner stayed the same.

Design and documentation.

A racing team’s identity has to work at speed and at a distance. The livery is the main canvas: a base colour chosen to read on a television screen, a handful of accent tones, and large flat areas where partner marks sit. Because the cars change shape from season to season, a livery is redrawn every year, and teams tend to keep the colour logic constant while the graphics move around the bodywork.

Sponsor placement follows the camera. The engine cover, the sidepods, the front and rear wings and the driver’s helmet are the spots often seen in broadcast and photographs, so title partners usually occupy them, while smaller marks fill the nose, mirrors and endplates. The same hierarchy carries over to race overalls, team kit and caps, where chest, sleeve and collar positions are allotted to partners in a similar order.

The team wordmark then ties the system together. It appears on the car, on garage back walls, pit boards, motorhome hospitality units, transporter trucks and merchandise, and it often has to accommodate a title sponsor’s name that may change with each new contract. In the garage, colour-matched panels, tool chests and floor graphics turn a working space into a branded set for the cameras.

When the Silver Arrows turned black.

A sharp change of colour came in the middle of 2020. Top Gear, in a report by Vijay Pattni dated 29 June 2020, said Mercedes-AMG had revealed a new black livery for its 2020 Formula One car as a public sign of its commitment to increase diversity and to stand against racism. The report said the halo of the W11 would carry the words “End Racism” and that the mirrors would show the hashtag “#WeRaceAsOne”. BusinessLIVE, publishing a Reuters report the same day, noted that Mercedes had traditionally raced in silver throughout its time in Formula One and said the black cars would make their debut at the season-opening Austrian Grand Prix.

For a brand built on the word “silver”, the decision showed how far a livery can carry a message. Both reports quoted team principal Toto Wolff saying that “the Silver Arrow will race in black for the entire 2020 season”. The sentence shows how far the nickname had become a brand name rather than a description: the team kept calling its car the Silver Arrow while announcing that it would not be silver. The base colour changed; the name, the partners and the title stayed.

The system now has several fixed points. The Mercedes star and name come from the car maker; AMG ties the team to the performance road cars; Petronas supplies both a word in the title and a colour on the bodywork; and Brackley and Brixworth give the operation a home in England. Around those points, the base colour of the car has moved between silver and black.

For a design guide, Mercedes-AMG Petronas shows how a team can wear a heritage colour, a partner’s colour and a protest colour inside one identity. Compare it with Mercedes-Benz, the car brand whose star it carries, the Formula 1 series identity, and the Williams Racing and Red Bull Racing teams. For this guide we use arrow silver, partner teal and livery black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.