Oil is an extremely lucrative business, anyone who is involved in oil can afford any of the cars I have talked about before on Smell Of Petrol. Gulf oil was founded by William Larimer Mellon, Jr. in 1901. Obviously as an oil company it has made lots and lots of money, meaning Gulf could venture into racing. A racing car is great advertisement for an oil company, because cars use oil and petrol (I hope you know that petrol comes from oil because if not I am worried for you). The light blue and orange racing colours made their debut in 1967. Gulf’s corporate colours of dark blue and orange were deemed do dull for a livery, they decided to brighten them up and use a much lighter powder blue. Interestingly Gulf became the first oil company to officially trademark its racing colours.
Gulf has to be the most famous racing livery out there, probably because of it being slathered all over the Ford GT40'S that beat the Ferrari's at Le Mans in the 60's. The livery has been put on so many other famous cars; the 2009 Lola-Aston Martin LMP1, the 1997 McLaren F1 GTR Long tail, the 1971 Porsche 908/3, the 1965 Ford GT40 (as mentioned) and without a doubt my favourite which is the 2006 Aston Martin DBR9, what a beautyyyy.
Gulf as a company is defunct now (well its sort of floating about in the form of chevron but who cares), but the legend lives on through the liveries on race-cars that will not be forgotten. Saying that
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