I Had No Idea A Lobster Race Car Livery Could Be So Good: Cold Start

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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.

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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.

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Mercedes Streeter

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58 thoughts on “I Had No Idea A Lobster Race Car Livery Could Be So Good: Cold Start”

  1. Jason, you described their 82g perfectly. In the 83 season it was uncompetitive, and Cowart and Miller bought an 83g with a Chevy V8 from Al Holbert. Al had won a few races with it. They did the Red Lobster livery on it. They got a few 2nds with it, and it was the best known of the two cars. I bought the car from them in about 2007, and vintage raced it at Monterey and elsewhere for about 6 years. I sold it in that Bring a Trailer ad shown to a guy in Colorado with a nice collection, and he occasionally races it.

  9. Don’t know about lobsters but crawfish (crayfish? crawdads? Nobody in my childhood town, which was a college town in the upper U.S. Southeast, could agree on nomenclature) are fiendishly fast, at least in reverse (maybe not such a good thing in automotive circles unless one’s Jim Rockford.)

      1. You mean crawfish? When I lived in Baton Rouge for a couple of years they were easy to catch. Every restaurant had them on the menu, including the Italian restaurant I worked at.

  12. Which came first, the graphics or the sponsorship? If it was the sponsorship, kudos to the designers. If it was the graphics, it was truly inspired.

  15. The pairing of both the Red Lobster livery and the Budweiser sponsorship decal is just the most fantastic thing I’ve ever seen. I know that when I am enjoying second rate seafood, I love to wash it down with a second rate beer.

      1. Hey! For a light, crisp, non-sweet bubbly thirst-quenching guzzle, Budweiser “Zerio” (as my grandson called it) is perfect.
        Of course, when I want flavor I’ll grab something else entirely. (For a great NA IPA, try Athletic Brewing’s “Run Wild” — excellent.)

        1. Flick has a good take – beer flavored carbonated water isn’t a bad thing given that there are still regular beers.

          I tried it once after a workout (as the ads strongly imply one should) and it was fine, though the psychosomatic effect made it feel very weird drinking it.

      1. I’ve always liked that sorta grass-roots feel that IMSA has, even now.

        As in, “we don’t mean ‘sports car racing’ in the snooty way…we’ll take any and all sponsors!”

        I recall the Mustang SVO sponsored by Miller Lite back in the ’80s.

  18. Ummmm don’t lobsters have 4 legs on each side, plus the claws? One would think the renowned marine life experts working at Red Lobster would know this.

      1. Sure, definitely not the kind of place that would welcome off-color material. Anyway, back to that debate about whether I should rent my mouth to the internet or teleport my urine…

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