Pump Fury "Lotus"

The Lotus entry rounds out Reebok’s 2013 Insta Pump Fury F1 Racing Pack, and it is the one that rewards a little knowledge of the sport. Lotus is one of Formula 1’s most storied names, a team tied to decades of innovation and tragedy, and by the early 2010s the badge had returned to the grid in black and gold, the colors most fans associate with the team’s iconic John Player Special era. Reebok translated that scheme onto the Pump Fury, pairing the dark, gold-accented livery with the carbon-fiber texture that ran across the whole pack as a nod to race-car construction.

The Insta Pump Fury earns its place as an F1 canvas through its own history. The 1994 original threw out laces in favor of an inflatable Pump fit and put its mechanical structure on display, a piece of design so far ahead of its moment that it still looks futuristic. That engineered, almost exposed aesthetic mirrors the appeal of an open-wheel race car, where the machinery is the point. The black-and-gold Lotus colorway is the most subtle of the three, a livery that means more to people who know where it comes from. For an archive following the overlap between motorsport and footwear, the F1 Pack is a strong modern chapter, and the Lotus pair shows how much a color combination can carry when it is borrowed from the right place.