When you think about themes that might make for a good racecar livery you might consider looking to sleek, fast things like birds of prey or a cheetah or lightning or wind or something like that. I suspect you’d have to go pretty far down your list of animals and the occasional natural phenomenon before you landed on a lobster. Lobsters are slow, clunky things that move and look like biological clockwork, and when they’re red, that means they’re dead and cooked, ready to be slathered in butter and painstakingly disassembled and eaten by you. And yet, somehow, when a red lobster livery was selected by, shockingly, Red Lobster in the 1980s. And it’s spectacular. Just look at it.
That car is a March 83G, built by a British engineering company and using the 3.5-liter engine from the BMW M1, the same car that Andy Warhol used as the canvas for his famous BMW Art Car. Later the team, led by Dave Cowart and Kenper Miller, switched to a 3.3-liter air-cooled turbo flat-six from the Porsche 935. More importantly for this particular little post you’re reading right now, though, is that the March 83G had a pair of huge pontoon fenders that were ideal for painting huge lobster claws on.
It just works, somehow! The simple graphic quality of the lobster is just right, with its flat red color and bounded by that aqua border, and the shape of the lobster just works so well with the car. The naturally mechanical look of a lobster means that the various vents and panels and intakes that the lobster is painted over don’t detract, but rather enhance the look.
Even Red Lobster’s mildly absurd Black Letter typographic logo works in this context.
It’s all so good I’m wondering why no carmaker is offering a lobster hood decal, like the Screaming Chickens of old. Someone with a big-hooded car should consider it, at least.
https://www.racingarchives.org/tag/march-83g/
https://www.conceptcarz.com/profile/6779,6067/1983-March-83G.aspx
The car was so distinctive that after it was uncompetitive it was leased to IMSA for display in cities before the races. They pulled the race engine, and put in a stock Chevy, so it could be driven into the malls it was being displayed. Of course, the truck driver had to try it out in the parking lot, and flipped it. The race engine was put back in in it later. Kenper Miller told me that story, and said it was one of the 13 times it had to be repaired from crash damage.