Are racing car liveries as cool and memorable as they used to be? Let’s ask a man who should know. The trouble is, any conversation with Peter Stevens, the eminent designer behind some of the best, can never be linear or simple – which is kind of ironic given how ‘simple’ is a recurring theme that we keep looping back to.
A chat with Stevens is always colourful and you never quite know where he’ll go next. He’ll divert to tell you what he thinks of the new generation of LMDh/GTP sports cars at Daytona. Or how Frank Williams admitted to him that the late 1990s Winfield tobacco livery was a mess (but didn’t really care). Or how he once discovered Flavio Briatore’s ‘secret apartment’ when he leaned against a fake bookcase in the flamboyant Italian’s old Benetton office.
But amid a thoroughly enjoyable 40 minutes of entertaining and enlightening snippets, a pattern does emerge from the collage: yes, Stevens does still spot design
