McLaren explain why papaya remains prominent in Chrome special livery

McLaren CEO Zak Brown has revealed why the team opted to keep a large papaya presence on its special Chrome British Grand Prix livery.

The Woking-based outfit has harked back to the 2006 to 2014 era that saw Lewis Hamilton earn his first F1 World Championship and McLaren's last with its latest one-off design for the upcoming race weekend at Silverstone.

But despite being billed as a Chrome special, in part due to the team's partnership with Google, a large part of the MCL60 remains in the papaya already seen in the main livery.

This is largely down to F1's regulations around liveries, with only one major change being permitted in a season.

McLaren already ran its triple-crown special at the Monaco and Spanish Grands Prix, meaning that a large part of its base car had to stay put for Britain.

Identity

Elaborating on the reasons for keeping a large papaya presence, Brown told select media including RacingNews365.com: "We want to keep our Papaya identity.

"It is very important to us to give a nod to the past but also very much look forward to the future.

"There's only so many times you can change the livery so what we did in Monaco, you are only allowed to do a couple of times, and then to kind of have variations of your base scheme, you can do a bit more often.

"But I think rules aside, it was important to us to build our association with papaya, much like Ferrari is red and Mercedes has its colour identity, we have a lot of feedback from our fans that really like the papaya so that's why we went with the combination."