How the 70's were the most colourful chapter in motorsport.

 

How the 70s were the most colourful chapter in motorsport.

Written by Oran Scully 10.12.24

The 1970s was the most colourful chapter in the history of motorsport . In the heat of battle you had the bright orange sponsorship of Jagermeister , the minty greens of the sponsor Vaillant , and the psychedelic colour schemes of the Martini Rossi team to name but a few. All of these colours were placed over the surface of some of the most exciting racing cars that ever existed the Porsche's 917 and the Porsche 935.

But just a few years earlier it was a completely different story with the application of the colour white, the default option for the colourisation of all race cars . What caused such a turnabout! Its roots can be traced to an upset race car designer Anatole Lapine and his boss, the designer of the 917 , Ferdinand Piech.

 

Porsche 911 1969                                                                                      Author Wayback machine Toth Karoly dr. 

Everyone remembers the summer of 1969, Woodstock, the hippie movement, San Francisco, flowers in the hair, but in terms of motorsport the Summer of 1970 is quite forgotten , even though it was the beginning of a period of artistic endeavour between artists and engineers. Our story begins in France at the Le Sarthe Circuit outside Lemans, it is June 1970 and its pit garages reverberate to the sound of a Porsche 917, its twelve cylinder engine sound emanating from within the confines of the circuit and its pit areas , a kind of mechanical music, loud yet still appealing to the ears. But it was not only the sound which drew attention, it was the paintwork of the sports prototype that drew most attention.

Hippie Porsche 917                                                                                                   Author : Peter and Laila  Flickr 

Emerging from the pitlane the Porsche 917 of the Martini Rossi team caused quite a stir, its bodywork resplendent in an amazing psychedelic paint scheme of purple with an elaborate swirling white psychedelic wave design. The car designer the Latvian Anatole Lapine together with assistant Richard Soderberg had started something in the summer of 1970 , by creating a design for their Porsche's 917 race car , something that brought art and industry together in a way , not seen since the days of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who later were themselves inspired to put art on race cars.

As the race weekend progressed the white wave design became even more trippy, when the white paint was replaced with a green paint. The now purple and green car was quickly given the nickname the Hippie Car. In the late 1960s the Hippie movement exerted a strong influence on women's clothing styles . 

 It is said that Lapine was inspired to create the hippie car design after seeing the dress of a secretary at Porsche there may have been an influence of the album art of the time as well in his mind.

                                                                                                                                     Author: Peter and Laila Flickr 

Fashion was a source of design inspiration for the cars livery, but where did Lapine get his idea for the colour combination of purple and green ?

The late 1960s and early 1970s were influenced by nature and Lapine like all designers was influenced by it. The car had a shade of blue purple like a flower that can be found in any garden. The green and purple is a loud combination not unlike the car's 12 cylinders. But the design is clever, as it allows the purple to dominate the green. The car at speed would have been a purple haze and would have lit up the otherwise drab concrete garages when it returned from the circuit.

So 1970 was a pivotal year in that it introduced art into motorsport. The artistic paintbox was opened , yet like Pandora's Box; it could not be closed. From within its confines came the wild and loud combinations of purple and green as well as other colours . As the lid was forced back down a new colour exploded from within, that of the colour of pink. The pink colour when heated and then subjected to the fuel of the Hippie Movement created a psychedelic atmosphere all of its own.

At Le Mans 1971 the Hippie cars were no more, and it seemed that the plain white colour favoured by Ferdiand Piech and the Porsche family still held strong. However, although Piech was the master of everything technical Lapine as Porsche Chief Designer had the last word regarding the decoration of the cars.

For the June 1971 Le Mans event, one particular car caused an even bigger sensation than the Hippie car of 1970.

The car in question was Porsche's 917/20, an attempt to blend the short tailed 917K and the long tailed 917LH, which led to the weirdest and rarest of all 917s. But it was not the shape of the car that caused a stir, it was the car's extravagant paint scheme , that of a flesh coloured pink paint scheme with a schematic butcher's chart of red separating lines on the bodywork. Whilst the long tail 917 hippie car of 1970 was of Lapines design, the pink liveried car was a design of the SERA Design Bureau in Paris.

Pink Pig                                                                                                                                       Author: Ank Kumar 

Lapine was upset with Piech that he had chosen an outside team to design the car. It must be noted that the discord between these two men led to the entry of art into motorsport. When Lapine saw the Sera designed car in Zuffenhausen he thought that it looked like a pig. On the inner bodywork of the car his team painted in pink the name Rosa Bertha , this sowed the seeds for the pink livery, and so the car's paintwork was a creative revenge by Lapine and his team.

Whilst psychedelic art declined after 1972 the creativity of the hippie car designs could not have been lost on one particular race car driver Herve Poulain, who along with his race car activities was also an art dealer. The Hippie cars had shown that a racetrack is like an open art gallery. Lapine was the catalyst, the spark that saw art and the motorcar industry combine. Racing cars were transformed into colourful one offs. The graphic design made them look cool, a breath of fresh air, flower power and the result was that psychedelic art swept across the racetrack.

Yet as in Sven Voelker book “Go Faster the designs were barely documented and instead of the bodywork of the hippie cars being preserved the paint was simply stripped away for the next team patrons sponsors .

1975 could be seen as the next pivot year of motorsport and it would be a BMW and not a Porsche that came to recognise the significance of art on a race car.

Inspired by Poulain, American artist Alexander Calder painted Poulan's race car a BMW 3.0 CSL using his signature primary colours.

Calder Art Car                                                                                                   Author: 0032 THDE Wiki Commons

Whilst the hippie cars were not treated as works of art by Porsche, BMW saw Calder's efforts as a work of art and so began the BMW Art Car Series opening the door to other artists to paint future race cars of BMW , names like Lichtenstein, Warhol , and Stella all eagerly offered their talents to paint these cars.

Warhol Art Car                                                                          Author : Dennis Fraevich Wiki Commons 

In conclusion the 1970s were the most colourful era for motorsport and the car in general. It saw the most memorable race cars being used as a blank canvas where artistic talent flowed, where the ubiquitous race car colour white was an ideal base colour for their talents in an era when flower power and horse power combined with the artist brush.