The Story Behind Why Cars Have Racing Stripes

Kurmyshov/Getty Images

Park a Shelby GT350 next to a Ferrari 458 Speciale, and you're looking at two very different cars. Different countries, different engines, different philosophies of fast. Yet both are the hotter, lighter, racier versions of cars you could buy in perfectly ordinary trim, and both have worn the same visual shorthand for "this thing belongs on a racetrack": exciting racing stripes running front to back.

These stripes aren't only a Shelby thing or a Ferrari thing, either. They're plastered across much of the  performance car world, from Camaros to the Dodge Viper to modern track specials. So where did they come from, and why do they still look so good? The answer starts at Le Mans in the 1950s, when teams had to paint their cars in national colors: red for Italy, green for Britain, silver for Germany, white for America.

In 1951, American millionaire Briggs Cunningham showed up with his own cars painted white with two blue stripes. He never won a Le Mans race, but the look stuck. In late 1964, designer Peter Brock gave the 1965 Shelby GT350 the same treatment. Not every Shelby got them; only 43 percent of 1965 cars left Shelby American with stripes, and 56 percent of 1966 non-Hertz cars did.

Shelby never listed stripes as an official option, and dealer shops could add them upon request. Stripes were just the opening act, too. Automakers have sold visual graphics packages for decades, and the coolest factory car graphics out there prove how far that can go. So let's dig into why cars wear racing stripes, and why we can't stop loving them.

John Keeble/Getty Images

One thing all racing cars have in common is that they excel at going fast around corners. When the race in question is something like 24 Hours of Le Mans, where cars are being raced during the night, in rainy conditions, it can be difficult to know which car you are looking at when it is shooting down the Mulsanne Straight. Racing stripes became a thing primarily because they allow team members, spectators, and everyone else to identify the team they are looking at.

Do it long enough, and the look becomes iconic, and that's exactly why you will still see modern Shelby Mustangs rolling down the factory line colored in white with blue stripes. Moreover, racing stripes are also a thing of beauty. Robb Report quoted Jaguar's former director of design, Ian Callum, the same person who designed the Aston Martin DB7 and the Jaguar F-Type, as "Fundamentally, stripes matter; they accentuate a car's forms. By using stripes in a certain way, you can give a car a unity that it might not otherwise have."

Nowadays, the racing stripe is often used to signify a more special version of a performance car that was clearly inspired by motorsports. The 458 Speciale we noted in the intro, and the GT350 are both prime examples of that. So is the 2017 Ford GT '66 Heritage Edition that shares the same stripes as the one that raced in Le Mans in 1966. The street-legal GT40 Mk III didn't get the same love in 1967, when Car and Driver reportedly hated it over its build quality, even though the handling scored well. Ultimately, racing stripes don't enhance a car's performance, but they do signal the car is designed with performance in mind. It is visual, tied to heritage, and just plain cool.

Alex Bogatyrev/Shutterstock

Special decal packages and sponsorship are sometimes even more revered than the humble racing stripe. One of the more famous decal packages is the "Gulf" blue and orange, the same one you can find on 1960s Ford GT40s and other famous cars. If you want your car painted like that, you might have to pay up: JPM Collection, one of the largest private automotive collections in Malaysia, said it paid between $20,000 and $50,000 to paint its GT40 replica in the full Gulf livery.

Porsche's and Lancia's iconic Martini, Toyota's Castrol livery, a Rothmans Porsche, Ayrton Senna's Marlboro, Mazda's Renown, Porsche's Pink Pig, etc. All of these are now iconic, and some of the best liveries in racing out there. Many owners who want to tie in their new expensive race-inspired toys to racing heritage love to paint them in some of these liveries. Tim Burton, better known as Shmee150 and one of the most popular car YouTubers out there, specced his Ford GT in Liquid Red with gold stripes as a tribute to the 1964 GT40 liveries of Alan Mann Racing.

The appeal of such liveries is so strong that automakers often include them straight from the factory for their most important customers. For instance, Mercedes offered the AMG GT Black Series Project One Edition, one of the most capable roadgoing track-focused cars sporting a Mercedes badge in decades, with a livery inspired by its Petronas F1 car, exclusively for those who were actually lucky enough to secure an allocation for the multi-million dollar Mercedes-AMG One.