A splash of powder blue and orange in South Wales has stirred up more than just nostalgia.
Swansea City unveiled a Gulf-branded third kit this week, drenched in the oil company’s unmistakable light blue and orange with a bold central stripe. The club framed it as a nod to Gulf’s storied motorsport palette — the colours that have wrapped icons from the Ford GT40 and Porsche 917 to the McLaren F1 GTR — and the reception was suitably warm.
But that very aesthetic appears to have triggered some last-minute wardrobe changes elsewhere. National League side Ebbsfleet United had launched a blue-and-orange away kit for 2025/26 with, yes, a similar orange stripe down the middle. On June 5, the club pulled it “for a short period” while supplier Admiral made tweaks. When the shirt returned on June 27, the orange had quietly become yellow. Ebbsfleet said the redesign was prompted by the impending release of a similar kit “in the global market,” flagged only after their initial launch, and that it was “suggested” the design be altered. By whom? They didn’t say.
If it all feels a touch… familiar, that’s because Gulf’s colours carry rare gravitational pull in motorsport — and increasingly beyond it. McLaren proved as much with that crowd-pleasing one-off at the 2021 Monaco Grand Prix, a love letter to Gulf heritage that instantly joined the modern livery hall of fame. Two years later, after Gulf switched allegiance to Williams in 2023, fans voted for a special trio of designs that the team ran in Singapore, Japan and Qatar. The partnership has since been extended ahead of the 2025 F1 campaign, keeping the Gulf-Williams tie-up active into the new season.
None of this is to suggest a heavy-handed intervention in Ebbsfleet’s affairs; there’s no indication of legal sabre-rattling here. But it does underline the reality that Gulf’s blue-and-orange is more than a colourway — it’s a global brand signature with decades of mystique baked in. When a second-tier football club’s third kit and a non-league side’s away strip start colliding over a motorsport paint job, you’re reminded how deep those racing stripes run.
What next? Swansea will enjoy the halo effect of a design language that resonates far beyond F1 grids and Le Mans posters. Ebbsfleet get a tidy workaround. And Williams, with Gulf on board for 2025, keep hold of one of the most marketable looks in the paddock — even if it’s on a football pitch where the latest chapter of Gulf’s livery lore just wrote itself.
