Cadillac’s Miami F1 Livery Is A Good Livery, But Bad For Miami

Race teams love special-edition liveries for individual races, particularly those that honor the location of the race, and Cadillac’s F1 team is no different. First we had the special shakedown paint, and now we’re getting a one-off livery for the American team’s first home race, this coming weekend’s Miami Grand Prix. There’s just one problem: This special, one-off, celebratory livery kind of sucks. 

To be clear, it’s a fine enough livery. It’s basically Cadillac’s standard graphics package, made symmetrical and with the ghostly Cadillac crest on the rear replaced with a stars-and-stripes motif that have a gradient effect. Sure, you’re celebrating the good ol’ U.S. of A., fine. The problem is that, as a special edition livery, it barely stands out from Cadillac’s normal wear. And as a Miami livery, it honors a city known for bright colors and lively citizens with… more banal monochrome. It’s a good livery, but a bad special one, and a truly terrible graphics scheme for Miami. 

Yes, the Miami paint job has a subtle red-and-blue star motif on the underside of the rear wing. That’s technically some amount of relevant color, I confess, and more than what the Cadillac cars normally have. But compare it to the Trackhouse Aprilia team from MotoGP, which did its entire bikes up in a United States flag print when the series visited Texas, and the Caddy livery just starts to look boring. It’s not a low-effort livery by any means, some designer clearly put work into making all the elements work together, but they put that work into something so subtle that you’d be forgiven for not even realizing this was a special livery.

If Cadillac ran this livery all year long, I’d have no issue with it (beyond the obvious jingoism of the stars and bars), but it really doesn’t give the wow factor that I want from a graphics package that’s meant to be special. It’s Miami, go all-out! Give us bright shades, neon hues, something interesting to look at! You’re only going to run this livery once, so do something interesting!