Under the hood of the Williams F1 team’s 2026 rebrand

The F1 paddock is a colorful place—and we mean that literally. Ferrari is known for its iconic red. McLaren lives by papaya orange. And in 2026, the Williams team wants to become synonymous with its refreshed blue color palette.

The team’s colors aren’t the only thing getting an update in the new year. Ahead of the 2026 F1 season, Williams, now officially racing under the name Atlassian Williams F1 Team, took on a new name, logo, and brand identity as part of its yearslong effort to return to Formula 1 glory.

Williams’s rebrand, team execs said, is meant to encapsulate the team’s goal of reclaiming the Constructors’ Championship, and is designed to maintain some of its history while catching the eyes of newer F1 fans.

“We are an icon of the sport, but we are future-focused,” Marcus Prosser, Williams’s marketing director, told Marketing Brew. “We want young fans, these new-wave and avid fans, to jump on this journey with us.”

In name only

Since American private investment firm Dorilton Capital acquired the team from the Williams family in 2020, Williams has been on a mission to reinvent itself. On the track, it’s charged up from a last-place finish with zero points that year to fifth place in the Constructors’ with 137 points in 2025. Williams also got a new title sponsor in software company Atlassian at the start of last season, the biggest partnership in team history at the time.

The rebrand, Prosser said, represents and plays a role in that business transformation, especially ahead of the team’s 50th anniversary in 2027. While Prosser said he considered tapping a London-based creative agency to handle the project, he ultimately turned to Williams’s internal creative team for the task.

Ed Scott, head of creative design, said he knew right away that at least one thing had to change: the team name. The Williams Racing name was a callback to several of the team’s former titles, like when it was Williams Martini Racing from 2014 to 2018, but it caused some confusion among fans and potential commercial partners, Scott said: While traveling to a race, Scott and his team spoke to “a very well-known celebrity” and introduced themselves as working for Williams Racing, at which point the celeb “turned around and said to us, ‘Oh, is that horse racing?’” Scott said.

The name Williams F1 Team is designed to be more instantly recognizable, he said, as is its new logo, a “W” with a subtle “1” in it that the company describes as a “21st-century reimagining” of its first-ever logo that appeared on all nine of its Constructors’ Championship-winning cars.

“We need not just an asset that speaks to us as a brand and our personality and tells our history, [but] also illustrates our intent of where we’re going,” Scott said.

I’m blue

Just as integral to the rebrand, Scott said, is the team’s color palette. White is the only color that’s appeared on every iteration of the Williams racecar, he said, but blue has been prominent in recent years. The team’s new blue color palette spans shades from a bright blue meant to “cut through the noise and bring the energy” to a darker hue that gives a more “edgy, premium look,” Scott said.

“We want to be the blue team,” he said. “We want to be a team that, in the sport, whenever you think of blue, you don’t think of any of the others that have blue in their color palette, you think of Williams.”

Ideally, the blue will also lead to “some striking merchandise” for fans to rep in 2026, Prosser said. The team hasn’t leveraged merch much in the past, he said, but they’ve started leaning in more recently with new apparel partner New Era, which took over for Puma in the fall. The team’s latest releases range from smaller items, like hats, to more expensive offerings, like mini replica helmets and team jackets, and are meant to appeal to all kinds of fans, especially those from younger generations, Prosser said.

“We know fandom starts at a young age,” he said. “We want to capture these fans, and we want them to take on this journey, because it really is one of huge excitement…We are now turning heads.”