There are PC gamers who hate RGB lighting. There are also PC gamers, like me, who are ready to RGB light anything. RGB lights on non-gaming products like neckties or toilets make my life worth living. So you can imagine my excitement when I first saw the new wheel covers for McLaren’s F1 car and thought, “Those crazy bastards did it; they added RGB to a race car.” Sadly, it’s not actually RGB, just a cool-looking byproduct of a strange sponsorship, but it did get me thinking.
On Wednesday the McLaren Formula 1 Team announced a two-year partnership with Google and Android. McLaren will be putting the companies’ branding on its cars for the 2022 F1 season as part of the deal, and that branding includes these cool-looking Google Chrome-themed, not-RGB wheel covers.
When you first look at the photos released by McLaren, the spinning Chromo icon really does look like the tires of the MCL36 Formula 1 race car have been bedazzled with RGB lighting. I can only imagine that at 200MPH, the wheels will look like Corsair’s giant joke desk fan.
Considering McLaren driver Lando Norris is a big gamer, I’m sure he would be excited to drive a car with some RGB on it. Let me just imagine them really going wild with it and hooking the RGBs up to their diagnostics systems, so that the lights almost act as a car health indicator. Fans watching in the stands or on TV could see things like tire degradation or engine trouble in realtime. Imagine seeing a car glow bright blue or something whenever it is close enough to another car to enable DRS. It adds to the drama but also keeps the crowd looped in.
McLaren’s new sponsor Google will run Chrome branded wheel covers on the MCL36.Genius ? pic.twitter.com/AEe2MhSH8kMarch 17, 2022
If we have to endure helmets, cars, and jumpsuits being covered from top to bottom with boring sponsor logos, let’s spice things up and add some Cyberpunk 2077-esqe weirdness to sports, neon lights and all.
Don’t get me started on how we can make MLB and NHL games 10 times more entertaining by having baseballs and hockey pucks change color depending on how hard they’re hit. I’m full of underappreciated million-dollar ideas.
I guess it’s just only a matter of time before the likes of a Razer or HyperX become an F1 team sponsor, and the hope of seeing Charles Leclerc’s helmet light up to reflect his mood during a race suddenly looks more likely.
