“I really like the idea (of an orange livery),” Martin Whitmarsh said last year.
“If we’re lucky enough to find a sponsor who likes orange, you could see that colour again in Formula One,” he added.
...well, there's Orange, who were title sponsor for Arrows in 2001 or so, who did an orange livery. Of course, that was before they were bought by Mannesmann and ultimately France Telecom. It's hard to imagine a largely state-owned business to invest in F1, even though it's a huge international brand that could actually benefit from the marketing. And they'd take over where Vodafone left off, rubbing it right in
One can only dream....
Anyway, the White and Red was Marlboro, but that's what they had, back when they had Honda on board. The Lotus team doesn't get any JPS money either, and still races their livery, simply because it's retro and cool
Of course the Lotus team has the problem of being at the same time the coolest team on the grid (well, at least last season) and the one with the least well sorted finances :-/
And now they've lost Raikkönnen, Boullier, and probably a bunch of techs as well. Who knows what Grosjean will do, with Boullier no longer around to micro-manage him.
I'm hoping that the Enstone team gets bought by another automobile conglomerate again. VW is probably out of the question, they already run two WRC and two ILMS entries, with Audi, Skoda, VW and Porsche, and who knows what else. But a Bugatti branded F1 team would be quite epic.
BMW is probably happy sticking to DTM and GT2, and not try F1 for another decade.
The French are all government owned, (even more so than VAG) so, I don't see a return of Renault, and PSA does WRC and just pulled out of Le Mans.
Pagani might be interested, as their roadcar know-how and tooling is useful for F1, and inversely, they might acquire some useful resources for their roadcar R&D from the F1 team. But they may look at how that went for Spyker, and decide it's not worth it.
This basically leaves us with US and Indian/Chinese brands -- the Japanese brands only just got out, with Honda now carefully testing the waters again, and the Korean brands can't really afford to spend money going racing, even though Hyundais are in WRC now.
Ford should be giving F1 a long hard look. Outside of WRC, there's not much visibility to the brand in international motorsports. Tata would probably rather have a look at Force India, but maybe the new owners of Saab would enjoy taking the brand racing
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