Seeing Red...

One thing that you’d notice immediately in testing photos from Jerez is the ‘striking’ new paint job on Alvaro Bautista’s bike. (Along with matching leathers - well, mostly matching; his gloves still seem to have the orange flashing from last year and have nothing to do with the livery, and he’s also appeared to retain his trademark bright yellow knee sliders).

And when I say ‘striking’ I’m being nice.
I really can’t say I like it at all - and I’m desperately hoping it’s nothing more than some kind of ‘interim’ livery and that come the Team Aspar presentation (mid Feb? it was mid Feb last year...) that we’ll see the good old blue and orange livery.
It’s not that I’m being lazy and can foresee having to repaint my websites at some point - though that IS a possibility - no, my main thing is that I just genuinely don’t rate it as a colour scheme.
It’s interesting to note that although Alvaro’s bike (and Hector Fabuel’s) run the red and white livery, the 125cc pictures I’ve seen show Talma on a bike that’s still running the blue Aspar livery, although with a dash of red here and there.

I like the Aspar blue. Well, the Aspar blues... they actually run two different variants of blue across 125cc (slightly teal) and 250cc (purer darker blue). It looks classy and it stands out. It has a richness that a stark red and white is never going to match.
Also, red bikes remind me of Fortuna - particularly if they’re Aprilias - and they remind me of Marlboro when they’re NOT Aprilias.
As you can see I’m not going to be a happy bunny if they run with the red.
And I’ll certainly be at home to Mr Grumpy if I have to repaint this site, alvarobautista.co.uk and BatiFans.com...

And don’t get me started on that dog-ugly new helmet design!!!