International Rise To Prominence
In the 1920s Bentley cars were hugely successful at the Le Mans 24h races, all sporting a mid- to dark-green. The first recorded use of the darkest green shades was on the Bugatti of Briton William Grover-Williams, driving in the very first Monaco Grand Prix, in 1929. This colour has become known as British Racing Green. In the 1950s and 1960s British teams such as Aston Martin, Vanwall, Cooper, Lotus, and BRM were successful in Formula One and Sports car racing, all in different shades of green. Scottish teams such as Ecurie Ecosse and the Rob Walker Racing team used a dark blue. The Australian-owned but British-based Brabham team also used a shade of BRG, and this was augmented with a gold (later yellow) stripe, gold and green being the national sporting colours of Australia.
Under pressure from a number of teams, most famously the Lotus team who wished to use the Gold Leaf livery on the Lotus 49, in 1968 sponsorship regulations were relaxed in F1. In 1970 the FIA formally gave Formula One an exemption from the national colours ruling and the previously common green colour soon disappeared, being replaced by various sponsor liveries. This exemption has since been extended to all race series, unless specific regulations require the adoption of national colours.
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Famous quotes containing the words rise and/or prominence:
“My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)