A bit of background from
www.grandprix.com below. Maclaren were white and red in the Senna/Prost days when Marlboro were the main sponsor. The colour scheme this year is chrome with some red, mainly on the wings and the Emirates logo will go on the front wing. The new colour scheme is a transitional one before they go to a corporate Vodafone red in the next year or two. If Emirates do actually go down the team route, you're talking minimum 100 million USD per year for even a middle-ranking team!
Emirates finally arrives at McLaren
It has been four years since the first serious rumours of an involvement from the Dubai royal family's airline Emirates in Formula 1. The first stories were from Germany where an investment banker from Bremen called Oliver Behring had big plans to buy Arrows with Emirates money in order to start a company called German Grand Prix Racing GmbH. The plan never came to fruition. It was in June 2004 that the stories emerged again, with Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, the chairman of Emirates, issuing a statement announcing that he was negotiating to buy control of one of an existing Formula 1 team with a company called Grand Prix Investments. By September that year there were stories that McLaren partner Mansour Ojjeh, DaimlerChrysler investor Prince Khaled Al-Waleed and Sheikh Ahmed had agreed to start a secondary McLaren team called Team Dubai.
Now finally we have a sponsorship deal between McLaren and Emirates which will see branding on the McLaren front wings. It remains to be seen if there are bigger plans down the road.