Paint a classic sports car dark green and nobody needs telling where it comes from. British racing green is about as British as a colour gets. So I was surprised to find out how it started: with a car maker’s olive green in 1902, and a race in Ireland the following year. And the usual explanation is that we ended up with green because the obvious colours had already gone.
Long before sponsors’ logos covered every racing car, cars in international races wore the colour of the country they raced for. I’m an enthusiast, not a historian, so I went digging. Here is how Britain got its green, and how some of the other great racing nations got theirs.
Open the snapshot: the whole story in five points ▾
- From 1900, an international race called the Gordon Bennett Cup gave each country its own colour. Red, white and blue went to the United States, Germany and France, so Britain had none of its own flag’s colours.
- Britain’s winning car in 1902 was already painted olive green. Britain then had to host the 1903 race, and because racing on public roads was illegal in Great Britain, it was held in Ireland, where the British cars wore shamrock green. That race is where the colour’s famous story comes from.
- France raced in blue, Germany in white and later silver, Italy in black and then red, Belgium in yellow, the United States in red and later white with blue stripes, and Japan, from 1964, in white with a red sun.
- There has never been one official shade of British racing green.
- Sponsors’ colours took over from 1968, and in 1970 Formula One dropped national colours. Green still turns up on the grid today.
In this article
- A race between nations
- 1902: Britain wins, and has a problem
- 1903: a British race in Ireland
- Still 1903: and then we lost
- How the other great racing nations got their colours
- What colour is British racing green? Britain’s many greens
- Sponsors take over
- Green comes back
- Over to you
- Test yourself
A race between nations
The story starts with an American newspaper owner with a reputation. James Gordon Bennett Jr ran the New York Herald. In 1877 Bennett left New York for Europe after a broken engagement and a society scandal. The story goes that he turned up late and drunk to a party at his fiancée’s family home and relieved himself in the fireplace. He settled in Paris.
He was rich, flamboyant and mad about sport. He put up trophies for yachting, ballooning and aeroplanes, and his name is thought to be where the British cry of disbelief, “Gordon Bennett!”, comes from.
In 1900 he added a trophy for motor racing: the Gordon Bennett Cup. It wasn’t a prize for drivers or car makers but for countries, each entered by its national motor club. The rules:
- each country could enter up to three cars;
- every part of every car had to be made in that country;
- drivers had to be members of the country’s motor club, but didn’t have to be from that country;
- the race had to be about 340 to 400 miles (550 to 650 km) long;
- the winning country hosted the next year’s race.
So the crowds could tell the teams apart, Count Elliott Zborowski, an American who had settled in England, is usually credited with suggesting that each country race in its own colour. The rules for the first race set them: blue for France, white for Germany, yellow for Belgium and red for the United States.
The first race, on 14 June 1900, ran 353 miles (569 km) on public roads from Paris to Lyon, and it was chaos:
- Germany: its only entry pulled out before the start.
- Belgium: Camille Jenatzy retired with gearbox and ignition trouble.
- United States: Alexander Winton’s car retired with a buckled wheel. It was the only car in the race steered with a tiller (a lever pushed left or right, like the one on a small boat) rather than a steering wheel.
- The result: only two cars finished, both French.
Near Lyon, a huge dog, a St Bernard according to some accounts, ran in front of the winner, Fernand Charron. It got caught between a wheel and a spring, jammed the steering and put his car in a ditch. For the last 7 miles (12 km) his riding mechanic held a loose water pump in place by hand. The American magazine The Horseless Age reported that the race was thought to have been very badly organised.
Britain had no car in that first race. By the time it joined in, red, white and blue had all been taken.
1902: Britain wins, and has a problem
Britain’s first attempt, in 1901, ended before the race began. Selwyn Edge was due to drive a Napier, but on the way to France its British-made Dunlop tyres were swapped for French Michelins. Every part had to be made in the entrant’s own country, so his car was out, and the French raced for the cup on their own.
Edge was born in 1868 near Sydney, in New South Wales, then a British colony, and moved to London as a small child. He made his name as a racing cyclist, and a fellow cyclist, Montague Napier, built the cars Edge raced and sold.
In 1902 the cup didn’t have the roads to itself. It ran at the same time as a much bigger race from Paris to Vienna, which had 219 entries of its own. The cup cars set off first, and for them the race finished at Innsbruck in Austria, after three days on the road from 26 to 28 June. Edge’s Napier, red in earlier years, was now painted an olive shade known as Napier green.
Six cars were entered for the cup, three French and three British, but the two British Wolseleys never started. Montague Grahame-White’s broke its crankshaft within a few yards of the start line, and Arthur Callan’s didn’t turn up. That left four cars racing for the cup, and only one finished:
- Léonce Girardot (France): out after about 87 miles (140 km) with a cracked fuel tank.
- Henri Fournier (France): out when his clutch failed.
- René de Knyff (France, Panhard): led the cup by over an hour after the first day, and was still leading about 25 miles (40 km) from Innsbruck when his car broke down on the Arlberg pass in the Alps. Out.
- Selwyn Edge (Britain, Napier): finished.
Edge nearly didn’t. His Napier was damaged at the rear on the Arlberg pass, and his tools and spare parts fell out on the road. He kept going and reached Innsbruck, so the cup was his.
After the race, a protest claimed Edge had been given outside help, which the rules didn’t allow. Accounts differ on what that help was. De Knyff, the man whose breakdown had handed Edge the win, insisted the protest be dropped, and the result stood.
Britain had won the cup. Under the rules, that meant Britain had to host the 1903 race. The trouble was that racing on public roads was illegal in Great Britain.
1903: a British race in Ireland
The Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland had to host a race that was illegal on British roads. Its secretary, Claude Johnson, suggested Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, partly because of public hostility to motoring in Great Britain. Richard Mecredy, editor of a Dublin motoring paper, suggested County Kildare, partly because its long straight roads were thought to be safer. Parliament passed a special law, the Light Locomotives (Ireland) Act, which received royal assent on 27 March 1903. Not everyone in Ireland welcomed the race: parts of the nationalist press criticised it, and Arthur Griffith dismissed it as “simply a commercial venture between rival manufacturers”.
Safety mattered more than ever. On 24 May, just weeks earlier, the Paris to Madrid race had been stopped at Bordeaux after a string of accidents. In Ireland the roads were closed for the race, and thousands of police, helped by soldiers and club stewards, kept the crowds back. The night before, more than 5,000 people camped in the fields near Naas, where the cars were checked and weighed.
The course was a figure of eight with Athy at its centre. One loop ran through Kildare, Monasterevin and Stradbally, and the other through Castledermot and Carlow. The cars ran seven laps on Thursday 2 July, about 327 miles (527 km) in all. They set off seven minutes apart from the Ballyshannon crossroads, and in each town they had to slow down and follow a cyclist through.
Four countries sent three cars each:
- Britain, in green: Napiers for Selwyn Edge, Charles Jarrott and J.W. Stocks.
- France, in blue: Panhards for René de Knyff and Henry Farman, and a Mors for Fernand Gabriel.
- Germany, in white: Mercedes for two Belgians, Camille Jenatzy and Baron Pierre de Caters, and an American, Foxhall Keene.
- United States, in red: Wintons for Alexander Winton and Percy Owen, and a Peerless for Louis Mooers.
In 1902 Edge’s winning car had been painted olive, in Napier green. For Ireland the British team switched to shamrock green, reputedly as a compliment to the Irish hosts. That Irish green, rather than Napier’s olive, is usually credited as the start of British racing green.
Mercedes nearly didn’t make it. On 10 June, three weeks before the race, a fire at its factory near Stuttgart destroyed the 90 hp cars it had built for Ireland. Mercedes asked customers to hand back 60 hp cars they had already bought, and raced those instead.
Still 1903: and then we lost
Jenatzy (Germany) took the lead on the second lap and never gave it up, in a borrowed 60 hp car against the best France and Britain could build. Mercedes’ own archive calls the win a surprise, and gives the engine’s output as 65 hp at most. The team fitted different axles to save weight, and Grace’s Guide credits how easily the Mercedes started and how smoothly its gears changed. At midday heavy rain made the roads slippery. All three British cars ran into trouble:
- J.W. Stocks: at Barnhill, near Castledermot, he hit a thin wire fence that was hard to see at speed. He and his mechanic were thrown from the car but weren’t badly hurt. Out.
- Charles Jarrott: his steering failed on the road from Stradbally to Athy and he crashed. He and his mechanic were both hurt, though accounts differ on their injuries. Rumours that Jarrott had been killed reached the grandstand before he was found to be alive. Out.
- Selwyn Edge: he struggled with tyre trouble all day and finished, but was disqualified because his car was pushed to restart it as he left the Monasterevin control. That counted as outside help.
Only four cars finished within the rules:
- Camille Jenatzy (Germany, Mercedes)
- René de Knyff (France, Panhard), 11 minutes 40 seconds behind
- Henry Farman (France, Panhard)
- Fernand Gabriel (France, Mors)
Every American car and the other two Mercedes dropped out.
Jenatzy was nicknamed the Red Devil, for his red beard and his fast driving. His win was the first major international race win for the young Mercedes brand, in a car borrowed back from a customer. Germany would host the 1904 race. Britain went home with a colour, and Germany went home with the cup.
How the other great racing nations got their colours
France: blue
France was given blue at the first race in 1900. It’s an old blue, known as bleu de France, which sat behind the gold lilies on the French royal coat of arms from at least the 12th century.
France also brought the Gordon Bennett Cup to an end. It had the biggest car industry in Europe, and the three-cars-per-country rule held its makers back. France won the 1905 race, so it was France’s turn to host in 1906. Instead, the Automobile Club de France announced it would not stage the cup and would run a new race with no limit on entries per country. With no host, there was no 1906 Gordon Bennett Cup, and the series was over. The new race, held near Le Mans in June 1906, is generally regarded as the first Grand Prix. A Hungarian, Ferenc Szisz, won it for Renault.
Bugatti, Delahaye, Talbot-Lago, Gordini and Matra all raced in French blue. The colour went with the team, not the car maker. Guy Ligier’s French team painted its cars blue in 1966 and 1967, even though they were built by the British firm Cooper.
The only French-built car ever to carry a driver to the Formula One title was run by a British team. Ken Tyrrell’s team, based in Surrey, raced French-built Matras fitted with British Ford Cosworth engines, and the engines went in at Tyrrell’s workshop in East Horsley. Tyrrell’s very first Matra, at the 1968 South African Grand Prix, was painted green, Britain’s racing colour. From spring 1968, after a new sponsorship deal, Tyrrell’s Matras raced in French blue. In 1969 Tyrrell’s driver, the Scot Jackie Stewart, won the world championship in a Tyrrell-run Matra MS80.
Blue returned to Formula One in 2021, when the team based at Enstone, Oxfordshire, became Alpine. So in 2026, France’s blue Formula One cars are still built in England.
Germany: white, then silver
The 1900 rules assigned Germany white, and its cars stayed white for years. The Blitzen Benz speed record car was white, and so were the three Mercedes that finished first, second and third at the 1914 French Grand Prix.
Silver arrived in 1932. At the AVUS track in Berlin, Manfred von Brauchitsch raced a streamlined Mercedes SSKL left in bare silver metal, and the live radio commentary called it a Silver Arrow.
You may have heard that Mercedes scraped the white paint off its cars overnight in 1934 to get under a weight limit, and that’s how silver began. Historians doubt it: the story first appeared in team manager Alfred Neubauer’s autobiography in 1958, and Mercedes and Auto Union had already raced in silver earlier in 1934.
From then on Germany had two racing colours. White stayed the official one, with silver, or bare metal, accepted alongside it. After the war, Porsche raced in silver through the 1950s and 1960s, while BMW went back to white in the 1960s. When Mercedes and Audi returned to top-level racing in the 1990s, they chose silver. Since 2010 Mercedes’ Formula One cars have mostly been silver, though the 2020, 2021 and 2023 cars were mainly black, and more recent cars have mixed black and silver.
Italy: black, then red
Italy wasn’t at the first race in 1900. When its Fiats joined the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1904 and 1905, the rules painted them black. Red was already taken by the Americans.
Black didn’t last. The first Grand Prix in 1906 didn’t require national colours, but the 1907 French Grand Prix brought them back, and its rules gave Italy red. The Americans moved to red and white. No record I’ve found says why Italy got red. A popular story says it was in honour of Prince Scipione Borghese, whose red Itala won the Peking to Paris race that year, but the dates don’t fit: the Grand Prix was on 2 July, and Borghese didn’t reach Paris until 10 August.
Red stuck. A Fiat won that 1907 Grand Prix, and by the 1920s red was firmly Italy’s colour. The shade is called rosso corsa, which simply means racing red, and it became the colour of Alfa Romeo and Ferrari, each with its own tone: Alfa Romeo’s is darker. Ferrari’s has changed too. From 1996 to 2007 its Formula One cars were painted a brighter, almost orange red that suited the sponsor and showed up better on television. For its 1,000th Grand Prix, at Mugello in 2020, Ferrari raced in the burgundy of its first racing car, the 125.
Belgium: yellow
The rules for the first Gordon Bennett race in 1900 gave Belgium yellow, with black racing numbers. Yellow is one of the three colours of the Belgian flag, though no source I found says that was the reason. Belgian cars raced in yellow from that first race, and still did when Belgium returned to the cup in 1904.
Yellow’s best years came in the 1950s and 1960s, through two Belgian private teams, Écurie Francorchamps and the Équipe Nationale Belge. A car raced in the colour of the team that entered it, not the country that built it. So when these Belgian teams raced British cars, they painted them Belgian yellow: yellow Jaguar D-types at Le Mans, and Lotus 18s hastily painted yellow for Monaco.
Is Belgium still yellow? Not officially. Formula One dropped national colours in 1970, and the FIA stopped publishing its list of national colours after 1977. Yellow is now Belgium’s racing heritage rather than a rule.
United States: red, then white and blue
The 1900 rules gave the United States red. That didn’t last: when the 1907 French Grand Prix brought national colours back, red went to Italy, and American cars moved to red and white.
By the 1950s the rules gave American entries white, with any exposed chassis rails painted blue. At Le Mans in 1951, Briggs Cunningham, an American who built and raced his own sports cars, kept the white and added a pair of blue stripes running the length of the car, from the bonnet to the tail. Twin stripes like these became known as Cunningham stripes, and white with blue stripes became the American racing colours.
The stripes then crossed over to road cars. In 1965 Peter Brock, a designer at Shelby American, drew twin blue stripes for the Shelby GT350, a high-performance Mustang. The factory staff called them Le Mans stripes. The blue stripes on white cars were there to represent the American racing colours, in the style of Cunningham’s cars.
Like Belgium, the United States has no official racing colour any more. Sponsors’ colours had already been allowed in American racing for some years before Formula One gave way in 1968.
Japan: white with a red sun
As far as I can find, Japan had no official racing colour when Honda decided to enter Formula One in 1964. The colours had been shared out in the early 1900s, long before Japan built racing cars, so Honda had to register one with the motor sport authorities itself.
Soichiro Honda, the company’s founder, wanted his car painted gold, even in gold leaf. Gold was already registered to another country, so Honda chose ivory white with a red rising sun, the Japanese flag on a white car. Its first Formula One car, the RA271, made its debut in those colours in 1964.
The colours were hard to look after. Brake fluid leaking onto the bodywork dissolved the red paint, so a mechanic carried a tin and touched up the sun after every run. The pale paint showed every mark of oil and dirt, and one mechanic wished the car were darker, like the green of the Coopers, the British racing cars built in Surbiton, London.
The colours have lasted. Honda’s Type R road cars are traditionally offered in Championship White with a red Honda badge, as a tribute to the RA272, the white car that gave Honda its first Grand Prix win in Mexico in 1965. And at the 2025 Japanese Grand Prix, Red Bull raced in white with a red sun on the nose. It marked 60 years since that first win and the last year of Honda’s partnership with Red Bull.
What colour is British racing green? Britain’s many greens
There is no exact shade of British racing green. In motor sport the term only ever meant green in general; the idea of one particular shade grew up later, away from the track. The rule was later written into the sport’s international code, but it said green, not which green.
The first greens, in keeping with the Irish shamrock and Napier roots, were lighter: olive, moss or emerald. Darker greens came later. The Bentleys that kept winning at Le Mans in the 1920s were mid to dark green. One of the best-known dark greens was on a Bugatti. In 1929 the British driver William Grover-Williams entered a Bugatti privately, with Ettore Bugatti’s permission, and had it painted British racing green to show it wasn’t a works Bugatti. He won the first Monaco Grand Prix in it.
In the 1950s and 1960s every British team picked its own green:
- Aston Martin, Vanwall, Cooper, Lotus and BRM: all green, each in a different shade.
- HWM and others: went back to lighter greens.
- British Racing Partnership: a very pale green.
- Brabham: green with a gold stripe, which later became yellow.
- Scottish teams: some used dark blue as their own team colour, most famously Écurie Écosse, whose Flag Metallic Blue Jaguar D-types won Le Mans in 1956 and 1957.
As with the other countries, the colour went with the team, not the car maker. When British private teams raced foreign-built cars before 1968, they painted them green. Stirling Moss raced an Italian-built Maserati 250F in British racing green, because a British team entered it.
Paint makers and car makers have since created their own British Racing Greens, solid and metallic, each with its own paint code, and there’s still no single official shade.
Is British racing green unlucky?
Some drivers, mostly in American racing, have long thought green cars were bad luck. Nobody is sure where the idea came from, but it’s usually traced to two fatal crashes in green cars: Lee Oldfield’s at Syracuse, New York, in 1910 or 1911 (sources differ), and Gaston Chevrolet’s at Beverly Hills in 1920, the year he won the Indianapolis 500. It never put British teams off: Bentley won Le Mans in green, and Vanwall and Lotus raced green cars in Formula One.
Sponsors take over
In 1968, after companies such as BP, Shell and Firestone withdrew their support, the sport began allowing sponsors’ colours instead. Team Lotus, which had always raced in British racing green, became the first works team to switch, at the 1968 Spanish Grand Prix. In 1970 the FIA, motor sport’s governing body, freed Formula One from national colours altogether, and British racing green soon disappeared from the grid.
Green comes back
Sponsors took over, but green never quite went away. Jaguar brought it back to Formula One in 2000. Bentley returned to Le Mans in a very dark green and won with its Speed 8 in 2003. Aston Martin’s DBR9 sports cars raced in a lighter green, and in 2010 a new team, Lotus Racing, entered Formula One in dark green with yellow.
In 2021 Aston Martin, one of the most British teams on today’s grid, brought green back to Formula One, and it was still racing in green when I wrote this in 2026. More than 120 years after a British team painted its Napiers green for a race in Ireland, the colour has outlived the rule that created it.
Over to you
If the old rules came back tomorrow, which colours would you most want to see on the grid? Pick up to three you think look best in the poll below.
Test yourself
Ten questions on this story. Try it now, then come back in a week and see what stuck.
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Sources
Open the sources: all 48 links ▾
The Gordon Bennett Cup and 1900 to 1903
- Gordon Bennett Cup in auto racing, Wikipedia
- James Gordon Bennett Jr., Wikipedia
- 1900 Gordon Bennett Cup, Wikipedia
- 1900 Gordon Bennett Cup (colours set by the rules), Golden Era of GP Racing
- Elliott Zborowski, Wikipedia
- 1901 Gordon Bennett Cup, Wikipedia
- 1902 Gordon Bennett Cup, Wikipedia
- 1902 Gordon Bennett Cup (the Wolseleys did not start; Napier previously red), Golden Era of GP Racing
- Selwyn Edge, Wikipedia
- Where did British racing green come from? (Napier green), Jalopnik
- 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup, Wikipedia
- 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup, Golden Era of GP Racing
- 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup, Grace’s Guide
- July 1903: Edward VII, the Gordon Bennett Cup and the Emmet centennial, History Ireland
- History, Gordon Bennett Classic
- Celebrating a Gordon Bennett anniversary, Motor Sport, August 1973
- 4th Gordon Bennett Cup race (Jenatzy entered by the German club), Mercedes-Benz archive
- Mercedes-Simplex 60 hp Gordon Bennett racing car, Mercedes-Benz archive
France
- Bleu de France, Wikipedia
- 1905 Gordon Bennett Cup, Wikipedia
- 1906 French Grand Prix, Wikipedia
- Matra MS80, Wikipedia
- The green Matra, The Human Side of Racing
Germany
- Silver Arrows (including the evidence against the paint story), Wikipedia
- Five motorsport myths it’s time to bust (why the paint story is doubted), Goodwood
Italy
- Rosso corsa, Wikipedia
- Ferrari unveils anniversary livery for 1000th F1 GP at Mugello, Motorsport.com
- 1904 Gordon Bennett Cup (Italy in black), Golden Era of GP Racing
- 1905 Gordon Bennett Cup (Italy in black), Golden Era of GP Racing
- 1907 Grand Prix (Italy given red), Golden Era of GP Racing
- Rosso corsa, canary yellow and the prancing little black horse, Hagerty
- 1907 French Grand Prix, Wikipedia
- Peking to Paris, Wikipedia
Belgium
United States
Japan
- Honda racing colours, part 1 (Soichiro Honda’s wish for gold, and gold already taken), Honda
- Honda racing colours, part 2 (the brake fluid and the wish for Cooper’s green), Honda
- Cooper Car Company blue plaque, English Heritage
- Honda RA272, Wikipedia
- Red Bull’s Honda tribute livery, Jalopnik
Britain’s greens, sponsors and today
