Striped liveries, surprisingly recent

TL;DR only since 2007 and 2011

Parsing "The Magnificient 7" book, I was surprised to only spot the classics that are the yellow nosecone and the more discrete noseband, with or without the painted hood stripe for the vast majority of the history of the car.

It's only in 2007 with the release of the Duratec-powered Superlight R400 and the famous Superlight R500 that the double stripes appear. Those were also used on the LEGO version, and the full-scale LE60-CAT made to match it.

They're called "double stripes" on the car configurator, those are the ones on my 170S. They could probably be called "SLR stripes". 

In 2011 came the takeover of the company by Team Lotus / Lotus F1 Team (not related to Lotus Car..), and with that, the green F1 livery with 3 stripes : a large yellow one and a pair of narrower white ones, one on each side. Those were used for instance on the R600 project, and offered as an option for all Caterham for a few years. A monochrome version appeared on the 620R press cars : a burgundy car with yellow stripes, and a blue one with orange stripes.

On the configurator they're called "triple stripes", but they're rally "Lotus F1 stripes". That F1 saga nearly killed them, but they made it and kept the 3 stripes, yay.

The full "F1 livery" option was painted rather than an applied decal kit, with a super wide yellow band on the back of the car, and nice large diagonal yellow and white accents on to match the F1 cars the sides as well. They really suit a SV chassis as they hide the akward proportions and make it really blend in. 

Nowadays a variety of special liveries are offered, ranging from the standard "swoosh" (2 narrower stripes), to specific limited series such as the ones found on the 485 Final Edition of the 310 Encore.

Looking at the image below make me think that at some point I will write something about headlamps and brackets.