One of the most distinguishing features of a real F1 race is the livery. Since many of the liveries are based on corporate branding, this translates very well when it comes to video game depictions of F1. Electronic Arts’ F1 24 is no exception. The game allows us to use custom liveries for our speedsters and is flexible when customizing them.

What are Liveries?

Think about your favorite F1 racer and what do you usually associate them with?

During the early days of F1, brands would be proudly displayed on cars and on the overalls of driver. But the purpose of this advertising strategy is two-fold. One, it promotes the brand. And two, F1 became a platform for research and development for the sponsor’s products. This is especially true for brands directly related to the automotive industry like Shell (fuel), Goodyear (tires), and Red Bull (energy drink).

In the 1990s, Michael Schumacher was always seen as synonymous with Ferrari, so his racecar was aptly painted in the familiar Ferrari red with the “Prancing Horse” logo at the front and a Shell logo below it. These designs, while purely decorative, indicate that the driver is sponsored. Liveries also serve as advertising for the sponsors. Since F1 races are long, having different colored liveries based on the sponsor’s brand is a form of advertisement. However, this also makes the liveries an important part of F1 culture.

How to Customize Liveries

While F1 24 has not yet announced a way to extensively customize liveries in-game, you can unlock some cosmetic items in F1 24’s Driver Career. This, however, will cost Pitcoins which are bought with real money (or gained in small amounts through the battle pass). Going to “My Team” will also grant you very limited customization options for your car. Another way to customize liveries is through image-manipulation software like Photoshop. This will take a lot of time but it’ll definitely make it your car.

Customizing liveries through image-manipulation software is simple. Just download your favorite image-manipulation software, download the assets you want to put in your livery template, create a 3-D model of an F1 car, apply the liveries to where you want to place them, make a mock-up and deconstructed livery print-out and save the project file. If using Photoshop, it’s recommended that you install an Intel-based texture shader plugin. This accurately renders the F1 car and the liveries in Photoshop.

It becomes a little tedious when you want to install the livery to F1 24. Since the liveries do not fit in one project file, you must make multiple files based on the livery's position (front, back, side, wing, fin, etc.). A specialized archiver is also a common thing with customizing F1 24 liveries. The Ego ERP Archiver is perfect for the job. Just put the files in the archive and put the archive to the F1 24 folder that contains the game data.

Why Customize Liveries?

The hallmark of sports games is the ability for players to customize their characters and other game items. Sports games have benefitted from this since most games now feature an RPG-like game mode through something like F1 24’s Driver Career. There is a sense of “owning” the character when there are customization options available to the player, alongside the stat/attributes that grow as the player progresses.

Conclusion

F1 24 is still a new game that has some limited features like customizing liveries. However, players can still put their own identity in the game through external (not in-game) programs that can aid in creating custom liveries. Eventually, we hope that there’ll be an extensive editor that includes an option to create custom liveries in-game.