Porsche has spent the better part of a decade circling Formula 1 without ever quite committing. Talks with Red Bull Powertrains collapsed in 2022 over control of the technical partnership, and the Volkswagen Group’s own boardroom politics have kept the brand on the sidelines ever since. Every couple of years a leak surfaces, a testing mule gets photographed in disguise livery, and the paddock spends a news cycle speculating before Porsche quietly denies everything. It is the kind of will they, won’t they that has defined Porsche’s motorsport ambitions since Zuffenhausen dabbled in F1 engines back in the 1980s with McLaren. Riccardo Dessi and
William Almkvist decided to stop waiting for an answer and build one themselves.
Their Porsche F1 Livery Concept imagines what a potential grid entry might actually look like, rendered with enough polish that it could pass for a factory reveal. Dessi modeled the car, Almkvist handled the texturing and environment work in Substance Painter and Photoshop, and the pairing borrows its color identity directly from Porsche’s current 963 endurance racer. Purple, black, and white blocks wrap the sidepods and nose in diagonal splits, with TAG Heuer, Mobil 1, AT&T, and ABB branding filling out the sponsor real estate. The result reads less like fan art and more like a livery Porsche’s own marketing department left on the cutting room floor.
Designers: Riccardo Dessi, William Almkvist
Endurance liveries get generous surfacing to play with, long doors, wide flanks, an expansive rear deck, but an F1 chassis offers almost none of that. Every panel is compressed, sculpted around cooling ducts and aero surfaces that leave no room for a clean graphic sweep. Instead of shrinking the 963’s purple gradient into a single stripe, they let it fracture across the nose, halo, and sidepod undercuts, so the color still reads as one continuous idea even when the bodywork it sits on is broken into a dozen different planes. That is a harder design problem than it looks, and it is the detail that separates this from a livery slapped onto a stock F1 render.
The front wing and endplates carry the most convincing sponsor logic in the whole package. TAG Heuer’s watch branding sits on the rear wing exactly where Porsche’s factory partnership already places it in endurance racing, and ABB occupies the same lower corner of the front wing it holds in Porsche’s Formula E program. Mobil 1 and AT&T split the sidepod real estate in a layout that mirrors how those sponsors actually appear on liveries across other series Porsche competes in. None of it reads as invented. It reads as a studio simply extending relationships Porsche already has into a category it has not yet joined, which is exactly the kind of restraint that makes a concept convincing instead of decorative.
Almkvist’s staging does as much work as the model itself. One set of renders places the car under raking violet studio light, its carbon weave catching hard directional shadows across a matte floor that feels closer to a livery launch event than a personal render project. A second environment fractures the background into shattered glass panels that scatter rainbow reflections across the bodywork, letting the purple gradient pick up secondary color shifts the way it would under real trackside lighting rigs. That second setting is not just a flex of Substance Painter’s capabilities. It gives the surfacing a sense of material behavior, showing how the paint would actually respond to inconsistent light rather than presenting a single flat hero shot.
Whether Porsche ever lands a Formula 1 seat remains an open question the brand has answered with silence for years. What Dessi and Almkvist have proven is that the visual case for it already exists, fully formed and sitting in a render queue, waiting for the boardroom to catch up. The 963’s purple and black identity translates cleanly enough across categories that it barely reads as a stretch, which says as much about the strength of Porsche’s current design language as it does about the two designers who ported it over. If the manufacturer ever does show up on the 2026 grid or whatever season follows it, its marketing team could do worse than start here.
