When Mercedes abandoned its traditional silver color scheme with a black paint job in 2020, the team made a strong, visual statement of its commitment to promoting diversity and combating racism.
However, Austrian and German media reports have claimed that the team will return to its traditional silver livery for the 2022 F1 season.
A sudden change in paintwork in one season, only to be dropped two years later, may seem unusual. But the first reports suggesting that this was Mercedes’ plan surfaced in October 2020 when team boss Toto Wolff was quoted by Austrian car magazine Auto Revue as saying that they would keep their new look for another season and then would change the following year.
The team brushed off questions about its paint scheme last year and didn’t inappropriately suggest that the championship fight against Red Bull was its priority. Shortly before the turn of the year, the German newspaper Bild reiterated its claim that a change was imminent and told its readers that “the silver arrows will be silver again”.
After the New Year, Mercedes released a teaser picture of a 2022 show car in black paint with Mercedes logos on the nose and the halo. The show car was purchased last year for paint trials.
The black Mercedes paintwork appeared in 2020. That alone doesn’t mean Mercedes will change its color scheme again: Teams regularly run tests like this to assess how well their paintwork looks on photos and on television. The car was photographed in black before being painted for testing.
Although Mercedes hasn’t yet announced its paint scheme for the upcoming season, RaceFans understand that it has decided what its car will look like.
In 2020, the team launched their car in one color and then drove it in another. Like its 10 predecessors, the W11 was originally shown in a silver paint job.
Mercedes had tried an alternative look the year before at the 2019 German Grand Prix, where it was executed in a partially white color scheme in an allusion to a famous (albeit untrue) story about an early team race. But the black paintwork was not an isolated case.
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The move from silver to black in 2020 came at the instigation of Lewis Hamilton after reflecting on the lack of diversity he saw in the photos of the F1 teams and was made in response to protests against Black Lives Matter on the murder of George Floyd on May 25th. The start of the F1 season had been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and during the break, Hamilton discussed with Wolff what the team could do to encourage greater participation in motorsport by blacks and others with underrepresented backgrounds.
The following month, Hamilton established the Hamilton Commission to promote diversity in motorsport. A few days later, Mercedes announced the change in paintwork, accompanied by a commitment to launch a program to improve the diversity of its workforce.
“In our organization, only 3% of our workforce identify as belonging to ethnic minorities and only 12% of our employees are women,” the team stated at the time. “This lack of diversity shows that we need to find new approaches to attract talent from many areas of society that we are currently not reaching.”
The black paint job has remained as Mercedes has started taking steps towards its goal of getting 25% of its new employees from under-represented groups each year by the end of 2025. This goal was defined in its Accelerate 25 program launched in December 2020.
Mercedes presented itself in black at the 2020 Formula E finale. By then, the team had already launched its Mulberry STEM Academy to offer after-school programs in science, technology, engineering, and math for students ages seven to 18. perform well and are currently well above the national average in many areas [but whose] Students in MINT subjects are not routinely included in courses and training, ”said the team.
At the beginning of last year, two more steps followed towards the Accelerate 25 target. In March, Mercedes entered into a partnership with the Stemettes to attract women from underrepresented backgrounds to engineers and to bring them together in four-month mentoring programs with Mercedes F1 engineers. A month later, she announced a similar agreement with the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers UK, which places students on internships and reaches them through a series of events.
In July, the Hamilton Commission announced the results of its investigation into the representation of black people in British motorsport and made a number of suggestions for improvement. Then Mercedes and Hamilton launched Ignite, a non-profit initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in motorsport, supported by a “multi-million dollar fund” to which they both contributed.
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These were steps Hamilton had wished for in early 2021. “There was a lot of discussion last year about equality and inclusion,” he said. “I think there has been a lot of talk, this year is about pushing diversity and really making sure that action is taken.”
His Formula E team took silver again last year. Now that concrete steps are being taken, does Mercedes still need the aesthetic gesture of a special paint job? Or does the team intend to keep it going for longer – for the duration of the “Accelerate 25” initiative?
There was evidence that Mercedes intended the black color scheme only on a temporary basis. His Formula E team followed the F1 squad and took on a black livery for the season finale in Berlin in 2020, but this was only meant to be for one event and returned in a silver livery the following season. Mercedes also introduced some silver on the fin above the engine cover on last year’s F1 car, as an allusion to the closer cooperation with the performance brand AMG.
The paint job was a noticeable move that drew attention to changes within Mercedes that were important but would otherwise not have aroused as much interest. Two years later, with the processes in place to create a more diverse workforce, Mercedes may feel that the black paint job has served its purpose.
Even so, a binary switch from black to silver can risk creating false assumptions that Mercedes’ pursuit of diversity is over or that the team believes its mission has been accomplished. Perhaps if the W13 is revealed, reports of a return to silver will turn out to be largely true, with an area of the car reserved to continue wearing the black branding.
But whether or how much of the black paintwork is retained is ultimately less important than the associated change in philosophy, which Mercedes seems to have embraced with all its heart.
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