Though Manor have gone the way of their back marker contemporaries HRT and Caterham, and their team assets are up for auction, we may not be seeing the last of them yet. During the 2016 season, everyone’s favorite plucky underdog further endeared itself to F1 fans by releasing an art deco styled poster for each Grand Prix weekend on the calendar. When the team shut its doors earlier this year due to lack of funds, and sent its employees packing, one of the first things that many of the team’s followers lamented was the end of these stylized posters, released through the team’s Twitter account.
With the dissolution of the team following the failure to secure any investors for the 2017 season, much of Manor’s staff began the search for new employment around two months ago, many of whom will likely seek jobs elsewhere in motorsport. The poster below, released by Renault Sport F1, suggests that they may have picked up the graphic artist responsible for Manor’s colorful posters, meaning we may yet have something pretty to look forward to on our social media feeds.
Whether or not this is the work of the same person responsible for the Manor posters, it won’t mean quite the same thing to us. Manor was a small family of adventurous souls trying to make it in the harsh world of Formula One. A small fish in a big pond, if you will. Renault’s posters may be pretty too, but something special will have been lost with the death of Manor. It’s no longer a defining characteristic of a small team; it now feels like a news release on a corporation’s social media feed. Sanitized, self-promotional, and lacking that je ne sais quoi, to “borrow” a phrase from the French.