The drivers are right: F1’s helmet restrictions are silly

2019 F1 season

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When F1 announced five seasons ago it was going to restrict what drivers could do with their helmet designs, Sebastian Vettel gave this spot-on assessment:

“I think it’s a joke to be honest. There are more important things to decide for the future and that seems to be the only one they can conclude on.”

Since then much has changed. CVC and Bernie Ecclestone are gone, replaced by Liberty Media’s new administration. Sweeping new regulations for the 2021 F1 season have been agreed.

Yet the clause restricting what drivers can do with their helmets remains: “In order for drivers to be easily distinguished from one another whilst they are on the track, the crash helmet of each driver must, with the exception of one competition of the driver’s choice, be presented in substantially the same livery at every competition during a championship season.”

The drivers have not grown to like it. At the Russian Grand Prix Daniil Kvyat was told he couldn’t use a special new design he’d produced for his home race.

Daniil Kvyat, Toro Rosso, Sochi Autodrom, 2019
Daniil Kvyat, Toro Rosso, Sochi Autodrom, 2019
(Kvyat suggested he would use the helmet anyway but, sadly, chose not to. How would the stewards have punished such a piffling and inconsequential violation?)

This prompted an outpouring of sympathy and criticism from his cohorts which is still going on. Pierre Gasly said the rule was “bullshit”. Lewis Hamilton called it “BS”, which of course is the same thing. And, not wanting to be outdone, Vettel upped the ante, deeming it: “major BS”.

When the rule was introduced at the beginning of 2015 it was justified on the grounds it would make it easier for fans and media to identify drivers. Which seems logical enough.

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But the rule was been written in a way that would tackle this problem. If helmets are to be used to distinguish between drivers then the rule should stipulate drivers wear different designs from each other. Instead, it only requires them to continue using substantially the same design from race to race.

Carlos Sainz Jnr, McLaren, Circuit of the Americas, 2019
Sainz had a special helmet for his 100th race
Does that help? Not really. All four Red Bull-backed drivers have substantially similar helmet designs bearing the company’s logo on the sides. And at other teams, drivers often have common and prominent logos on their helmets.

But the clearest argument against the helmet design restrictions is that there already are much clearer ways to tell the drivers apart. One of these was already in place before the rule was introduced: For years, teams have been required to distinguish between their drivers by painting one driver’s roll hoop-mounted onboard camera yellow.

When that isn’t visible – say, on a picture produced by that camera – there are other ways to tell the drivers apart. Many teams use the Halo to identify their drivers.

Furthermore, as Max Verstappen pointed out, two years ago F1 introduced rules specifying the size and location of each car’s individual number, giving a further simple way to identify each driver.

That’s three ways to spot each driver. Do we really need a fourth?

As Daniel Ricciardo pointed out, telling drivers apart by their helmet designs is more of a nostalgic concept than a practical one.

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“I get it from the point of view that obviously everyone holds some nostalgia with [Ayrton] Senna’s bright yellow helmet and [Niki] Lauda’s red one and all that. Yes, they were easy to spot, but also they stuck a metre out of the car back then. We’re a lot lower now, the halo covers it, so it’s less prominent than it used to be.”

Sebastian Vettel, Lewis Hamilton, Monaco, 2019
Vettel and Hamilton wore Lauda tribute helmets after he died
Allowing drivers to experiment with their helmet designs can help promote the sport, argued Ricciardo. In Austin he took advantage of the dispensation allowing drivers to change their designs once per year and sported a helmet style on a local American football team.

“Me being able to run like the football helmet this weekend, that’s cool for me. And I know the team, the Longhorns, like that, and I know Renault like it. It’s another way to introduce outside parties into F1. I know [Romain] Grosjean is running something from Cars so he’s bringing a little bit of Disney into F1. So it’s actually a way for us to introduce a new audience to the sport.”

Of course, what colour the drivers’ helmets are is not the most serious issue F1 faces. It may well be the least important problem. But that doesn’t exempt it from criticism.

The rule simply isn’t needed. It’s a fusty, knee-jerk ‘bring back the good old days’ reaction; the older generation shaking their fists at those young drivers with their tattoos and hairstyles and ever-changing helmets.

If some drivers want a different style each weekend, let them. There is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ about this; if one driver chooses to express their individuality by using the same design throughout their career, that is as valid as one who does the same by adopting a new look for every race.

There are a lot of good changes in the 2021 F1 regulations. The sport should add another by scrapping this silly and unnecessary rule.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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89 comments on “The drivers are right: F1’s helmet restrictions are silly”

  1. I must be the only one who likes the rule then . . .

    1. You and Crofty’s ego. Why would anyone have anything to say on whatever anyone wears?

      1. Yes not like uniform is a concept that has been around since the 16th Century or anything.

        That said, couldn’t care less about this rule whether it stays or goes tbh, it’s more a driver issue than an anybody else issue.

      2. The cars have restricted liveries.
        You’re against that too?
        I’m sure you’re not being literal, either, because I’m sure you don’t think drivers should be allowed to not WEAR balaclavas or fire-proof suits. Or clothes in general? I’m sure you’re just being hyperbolic.

        1. Biskit Boy (@sean-p-newmanlive-co-uk)
          8th November 2019, 8:12

          I’m against the restricted helmet design and I’m against the restricted car liveries too. These things should be allowed as it adds to the interest and richness of Formula One. Sure even the casual spectator could be aware that liveries could change from race to race. We could see more local sponsorship deals which I love to see.

          When it comes to rules for anything other than safety and close racing, less is more.

          Tell me this pic doesn’t spark interest.

          1. Biskit Boy (@sean-p-newmanlive-co-uk)
            8th November 2019, 8:13

          2. Biskit Boy (@sean-p-newmanlive-co-uk)
            8th November 2019, 8:17

    2. Not the only one, I like it too.

      In the 90’s, I knew every drivers helmet. While I’m admittedly not as clued up these days, it’s the first thing I look for. I can hardly see the numbers on some of the cars.

      The helmet colour scheme is like the drivers identity, it’s the only part of the human being inside the car that we can see. I don’t want to look for twitter handles on halos during onboard shots.

  2. I do want to see drivers have their own dedicated helmet design but wouldn’t be against having more opportunities to have special designs

    1. why not have the drivers names and numbers on the car in an extremely highlighted colour?

      1. Yeah i was thinking the same. They could have a strip of colour added / removable on the car to make it clear whose onboard, or even change the color of the wing mirrors. They could stipulate on the base colour used for driver’s helmet, with all else being up to the drivers. This is one of the few areas where the drivers are allowed to express something of their personalities on track. We have these personal traites in all other sports, so why not here?

  3. Having watched F1 for many many years, I cannot recall ever identifying a driver by his helmet. The colour of the top camera is what I look at to distinguish one driver from another i.e. yellow camera on a Mercedes is Bottas, black camera on a Ferrari is Vettel and so on. I do wish they would bring back the red colour though, I sometimes watch on a faily small screen and the red was easier to pick out. The helmet rule is ridiculous and I agree with the drivers total BS.

    1. Color cameras has been introduced just few years ago. And i never even paying attention to them. They are too small.

    2. @malc1110 using the T cam too.

      Since they’re gonna add the led panel with number on the side, that’ll be the best way to tell one driver from another.

    3. @malc1110 Pfft maybe for one or two teams would you really know which driver has the yellow or black camera

      If by “many” years you are talking about “less than 10” then perhaps your claim makes sense.

      If it’s actually “many” years then it was much easier to recognize by helmet design. In fact the camera colring wasn;t used and carts didn’t always have one.

      Back then it was instantly clear from the helmet if it was Senna or Prost, Schumacher or Barrichello, Coulthard or Hakkinen, Hill or Villeneuve etc etc etc

      Even if they switched teams you would see in which car they were driving.

      1. Have to agree @f1saurus, I don’t tend to know which driver of a team uses the yellow/black in general; but, I realise that I also don’t really know the helmet designs of all teams, depends a bit on how well you can actually recognize/distinguish the two drivers’ designs from a distance in the car, while halo-obscured I suppose.

        1. @bosyber Yes, there was a picture of all 2019 helmet designs together. They are all a blue+red+white mangled mess. With a few pink or black exceptions. There is no distinctive patterns.

    4. Lol first time I have ever heard about that I just pay attention to the driver number and car design

    5. I’ve always thought those closeup camera angles are the least informative shots of the race. The interest comes in seeing the track, not closeups on the driver. From race to race its the track which is the most telling factor of the race, yet so often we have those lingering ‘movie’ closeups on the driver which adds nothing to telling the story of the race.

  4. I really liked Vettel’s changing helmet designs before this rule came in. Was always fun seeing what he came up with. And in many ways it showed more personality than sticking to the same design each race.

    I agree with Keith 100%.

    1. @aussierod Vettel’s antics is actually why this rule introduced in the first place. I think people enjoy special helmets until he changed it every race and it probably rub Bernie in wrong way.

      1. For me the designs were a bit too different too @sonicslv and @aussierod, but, the bigger issue always was that if he veered into ‘might be Webber?’ territory, because of the

        Does that help? Not really. All four Red Bull-backed drivers have substantially similar helmet designs bearing the company’s logo on the sides. And at other teams, drivers often have common and prominent logos on their helmets.

        issue Keith identifies. For a large part at the time the STR/RBR helmets were too Red Bull branded to stand out.

        I do like how currently Vettel, despite the rule, manages to tweak his design regularly to the occasion, making it special from up close while keeping the overal, great and classic design he has. But, for me Kvyat’s design is just a color switch around with the same pattern as he always does, so I guess the people that judge it have no/little visual design acumen, and that means this rule leads to arbitrary silliness; time to let it go.

        1. Yes, Vettel’s helmet has become iconic (I’ve said this many times)
          Monaco, Singapore, Monza and Suzuka
          His helmet changed but maintained that overall design

  5. I think we need to go the opposite way. After all Croft is an expert and he couldn’t work out on the first lap the difference between 3rd and 4th place despite the Merc being a different colour than the Ferrari, or which Ferrari driver was which despite the big number 5 on the front of Vettels car.

    1. How dare you! You are a sky sports subscriber, shush and pay.

  6. For me the main point of silliness is that you can hardly see the driver behind the halo now! I’ve thought from it’s first announcement that by far the best thing they could do is colour the halo in a drivers colours. Seeing the Mercs run at Monaco with red Halos in honour of Lauda just reinforced that opinion. Do that, keeping the halo colour for the whole year (much like the rule on car liveries remaining substantially unchanged) and then give the drivers a free for all on helmet changes!

    1. I agree. The halo being a different colour for the teams drivers, would be a much better idea.

    2. @gobert I would suggest painting the halos in the same colour as the drivers numbers are painted in. Hopefully, none of the drivers driving for the same team have the same colour.

      1. I’m absolutely fine with having no rule regarding drivers’ helmet liveries, and I think there are enough ways otherwise for us to identify drivers/cars, particularly the different colour of camera on top of the airbox(s).

        Wrt halos and them being different colours…while I was never against halos, and never considered them ugly, and I got used to them in very short order, I do wonder if they (F1) are still trying to make them as least obvious as possible, and therefore I question whether teams would want to accent them by making them different colours from one another let alone making them the same colours of the drivers helmets as some have suggested. I wonder if they don’t want the halo(s) ‘sticking out like a sore thumb.’

  7. It is a small highlight of the season when drivers bring their special helmets to monaco. These changes add to the sport and make it better. It was bs rule when it came out and I’m glad there is a chance it will go away.

  8. I think Formula 1 has enough silly/stupid rules and this one should definitely be thrown out. As pointed out in this article, with the drivers lying nearly flat in the cars and the Halo obscuring the view into the cockpit, helmet design probably isn’t the best way to identify a driver anyway.

    I guess Liberty, like FOM/Bernie before them, doesn’t have a very high opinion of the sophistication of their viewers, thinking we can’t read a car number, which now is the best way to identify car/driver, since scrapping the cars being assigned numbers each season based on points finishing order from the previous season.

    But, I think Liberty, like FOM/Bernie before them yet again, are concerned more for ‘the show’ and less for ‘the sport’. Anyone else here old enough to remember when auto racing was truly a sport, and not an entertainment? Perhaps Liberty is moving it more toward entertainment with an eye to selling out to Vince McMahon ?

  9. robinsonf1 (@)
    7th November 2019, 13:19

    I don’t care about the rule but I also don’t care for drivers changing their helmet every race.

  10. When the rule was first introduced I remember thinking how cool it would be if the drivers put on a united front and all wore plain white helmets as a show of protest. For the one a year change they could all wear red :)

    1. Montréalais (@)
      7th November 2019, 15:48

      @glennb YES! +1

    2. Haha that would be great!

      I had another idea after reading your comment. They all wear a white helmet for the first three races, then the fouth race they all together switch back to their normal helmets. Except the catch is that the teamates switch. So Hamilton and Bottas wear the others helmet and so on down the field.
      Then they revert back to the all white helmets for the 5th race.

      Fingers crossed that this happens lol.

      1. Brilliant!

        Activist drivers driving FOM mad.

  11. Just paint the halo a different colour on each car and be done with it. You could even compliment the current cars so on Ferrari one is red and one is black, Mercedes one is silver the other is teal, Renault one is black the other is yellow, and so on

  12. 200% agree, helmets need to be diversified between races.

    They should tighten up on the numbers on the car rule, I am not able to easily distinguish the numbers on the red-bull cars, they others are all ok.

    1. Senna had just one design. And that design remained in history forever. What’s the point of that diversification? Everyone will forget last race design to the next race.

  13. :D Delete the rule! Make F1 great again!

  14. Agree with Keith.

    I mean…it’s also silly that the cars themselves are exactly the same. We can’t change something more substantial than a stripe on a camera (the ugliest part of the car)?

    I’m sure, however, that someone will say that two identical cars is in the DNA of the sport and they will stop watching forever if RedBull fielded 1 Diet RedBull car.

    It could also be solved More subtly with some other very small change. Maybe Botas’ front and rear wing are Petronas blue green.

  15. I’m pretty sure Ricciardo has used two substantially different helmets, the Jack Brabham one at China and the Longhorns one, in addition to his normal blue and pink one. I don’t even get how the current rule works!! I say get rid of the 1 change limitation.

    1. China was the 1000th Grand Prix. Drivers were allowed to run an extra design, if they so desired.

  16. I dont think this rule is needed but at the same time I don’t see it as an issue in the grand scheme of things.

    1. I agree – but when rules are not needed it’s best to abolish them.

  17. I would go differently, actually embrace personnal designs by only allowing a certain maximum percentage of a helmet to have sponsor logos.

    1. Pat Ruadh (@fullcoursecaution)
      8th November 2019, 0:45

      I like this idea. Or none at all. Plenty of space on the car or overalls.
      I kind of agree with the rule to some extent, as signature helmet design is part of the DNA and if everyone took the Vettel approach it would lessen the value of having personalised designs at all.
      It worked okay when it was just Vettel though, as changing designs was his signature. Ironically since locking in the designs, his has been consistently one of the best lids IMO

    2. That might actually help a lot @tango. I also like how Vettel has found a way to make interesting changes to his helmet design while still keeping it apparently fulfilling the “more or less the same design” this year.

  18. I don’t know what the fascination is with immediately needing to be able to identify a car by the driver – one of the few excitements in F1 is when a camera cuts to a car in the gravel/wall, trundling to a stop with smoke pouring out the back/shredded tyre or sudden position change and having to work out who, what and why is happening…

  19. To be honest I think it’s a silly rule but I also remember reading so many people, both commentators and fans complaining constantly about Vettel’s constantly changing helmet designs.

    1. petebaldwin (@)
      7th November 2019, 19:55

      Sure but that’s because it’s Vettel….. If it was another driver changing his helmet every race, you wouldn’t get any complaints.

    2. Yeah, Crofty and Brundle keeping hitting on it during endless boring laps of Vettel running away with the race again was what got us this rule @rocketpanda, especially when he then went on to use a different lid almost every race (since he won so many of them) @petebaldwin.

      As mentioned above, the biggest issue I had with all those designs is that the REd Bull logos made it hard to keep them from each other, and that went for all four RB drivers.

  20. For me, helmets pretty much stopped being a driver’s distinguishing feature a long time ago. The designs began to get sponsor driven, busier and more convoluted, the drivers started sinking lower in the car, the cockpit sides grew higher, and now we’ve got the halo and Indy Car’s aero screen. The safety aspects of some of these changes are obviously a good thing, but when the drivers are seated in their cars, and especially when at speed, telling one helmet from the next is a hard ask at best. Long gone are the days of Jackie Stewart’s simple white helmet with a tartan band, or the London Rowing Club design on Graham Hill’s lid. Now those were helmets (among many others from racing’s ancient past) you could identify instantly! I could basically give a fig what the helmets look like any more…too much work trying to identify them. And yeah, that rule is definitely a silly one.

  21. The rule is stupid, but so is changing the helmet design each race. I can’t understand why at a time when there are many people trying to make and maintain a “personal brand” defined primarily by logos and colors … a driver, who has one of the best displays for this kind of thing, decides to change each race and has no distinctive symbol or color. But hey, it’s his life and his head, I think I’m nobody to tell them what to do.

    I would like a driver to keep his design (with subtle or evolutionary changes year after year) and if I was a driver, I think this is what I would do, but for now I have to settle for showing my colors in Asseto Corsa, and I think that every driver should be free to do what he wants, and I will be free after to decide whether I like what he does or not.

    1. I agree with you. I think they should be able to have whatever helmet design they want but I can’t understand why they would want to keep changing. Like you I think of the helmet as their personal brand.

      I kinda think helmet design is too fussy these days. The art work is incredibly intricate up close but from a few metres away they look messy but again it’s all personal choice. The only thing I really hate is the giant Redbull logo all their drivers are forced to have.

      1. @esmiz @mattj

        but I can’t understand why they would want to keep changing.

        In Vettel’s case it was because he’d never really had a helmet design of his own, He’d had the basic Red Bull designed design since before he got into single seaters. He began altering it regularly because at that point the success he had achieved gave him a bit of freedom to break from the design Red Bull gave him. And the same is true with many younger drivers who’s designs tends to be based off sponsors or young driver programs. None of the Red Bull backed drivers for example design there own helmets, There shown designs that come from Red Bull & are asked to pick one.

        In the past a driver would design a helmet in karting or one of the first series on the ladder & stick with it. But now there are so many other things that influence deigns early on that many young drivers don’t have a design that is 100% there own so don’t feel the same sort of connection to a specific design as drivers like Lauda, Senna, Hunt etc.. did in the past.

        1. That’s a lovely bit of insight. Thanks

        2. Great point there, really hitting what the real issue is with helmet designs @gt-racer.

          I like how Vettel now has his own design and keeps tweaking his helmets while keeping them all more or less to that same (nice and simple) desing idea.

  22. It’s 2019. We have F1 drivers live-streaming their sessions in videogames. We have F1 posting content on YouTube. We have teams’ Twitter accounts throwing banters to each other every race weekend.

    F1 is – finally – out of the middle-age. It’s just a matter of time, this rule will go.

  23. It’s pretty sad that you have to recognise the drivers by the color of the camera. How personal is that? I loved the era when the driver’s helmet was truly iconic. You may argue that the styling of the helmet is less important because the head less visible in the car, but the drivers themselves also played a big part by constantly changing it. Back in 2012, when the helmets were no longer sticking out, you can easily distinguish Schumacher (red) from Rosberg (yellow), so I disagree that it’s a nostalgic concept.

    A rule to forbid changing helmets is nonsense, if only the drivers realised that for many fans an iconic helmet is still important. Colour the halo accordingly and drivers are easily recognisable, even for casual fans.

  24. I was watching a Sky broadcast from 2013 yesterday & at one point Croft & Brundle were discussing the helmet designs.

    Croft went on a rant about how drivers shouldn’t be allowed to change the helmet design because it’s confusing for fans & commentators while Brundle went on a mini-rant about how a helmet is the drivers identity & he simply can’t understand why they keep changing the designs because it’s something he never considered doing.

    So basically Croft doesn’t like drivers changing helmets because he’s a terrible commentator who has a hard enough time getting team names right and Brundle didn’t like it because it’s something he wouldn’t do & therefore doesn’t get.

    Sums up Sky’s awful coverage, All about them & there terribleness.

    1. @roger-ayles: Indeed. Sky F1 seems less about F1 and more about their celebrity lunch and dinner plans

  25. Honestly, let the drivers do a bit of customization of the car. Give Hamilton’s Mercedes some red highlights, give Bottas some blue highlights (well, his car, anyway), and make it obvious which car is which.

    They’ve got the halo, they could do edges like the vertical piece on top of the engine cover– there’s a lot of options.

    I’m not suggesting change the entire livery (like IndyCar, where two teammates might have completely different looking cars), but some extra bits of visible trim would go a long way towards individualizing the cars.

    The real issue with the helmet rule is that with the halo, half the time you can’t see the helmet anyway.

    1. Why not just let the grid kids drive? They will already have their own markers/crayons!

      Worst idea I’ve heard in this entire thread, and that says a lot!

      The teams build the cars, the teams decide the livery.

  26. José Lopes da Silva
    7th November 2019, 16:27

    They’re taking too much time to make the halos clearly distinguishable.

  27. As I’ve already stated, the rule was only implemented because of Vettel went way too far with his ego-boosting “experiments” in his Red Bull days.
    Changing it every once in a while is ok, changing it EVERY SINGLE RACE is utterly ridiculous.

    1. petebaldwin (@)
      7th November 2019, 19:58

      Doing whatever you want as long as you’re not Vettel is fine. If you’re Vettel though…. Utterly ridiculous. Evil in fact. Disgusting.

      1. That’s the second post I see in this thread, where someone try’s to pretend vettel is unfairly constantly picked on, unjustly, and he just cannot catch a break from the mean old fans!

        Yeah, no.

      2. Vettel’s fangirls… yawn

    2. I think we have to see that in the perspective of RB’s oppresive tendency to dictate ALL their drivers to have more or less the same helmet without the drivers having too much influence @liko41.
      Once Vettel started being his own man, he just started to push the boundaries.

      1. I indeed agree Red Bull helmet policy is silly, but Vettel was the only one constantly changing his. Literally every fricking race.

  28. I am upping the ante even more:
    this rule is The Ultimate BS!

    Now beat that! :p

  29. Why don’t football teams whine about their inability to change jerseys for every match?

    1. José Lopes da Silva
      8th November 2019, 9:25

      Football teams change their secondary jerseys every year. And lots of people complain.

  30. Why the same logic doesn’t apply to the entire car? I haven’t heard anyone say “Oh my god, that red car with the big logos that say MISSIONWINNOW, is it new? Because i rememered another similar red car in the previous race that had a 90YEARS logo on it. I’m so confused right now”.

    Honestly if after all those years, with the big PERSONAL numbers (not the ones 1-2-3-4-5… numbers that changed every year we had before) that are prominent both at the front and at the back, together with the TV graphics that display them next to each driver’s name (so that you don’t forget HAMILTON=44 for example), you can’t tell which driver it is, you are just an idiot. There are so many complicated things in F1 that might confuse a casual viewer, but not figuring out who’s driving the car by looking a obscured-by-halo helmet is simply not one of them.

    Even if a driver is forced to use the same design all season like it is now (not forbiding to change them season after season that many do), honestly apart from Vettel’s white+German flag or Alonso’s light blue or even some of Vettel’s RedBull-era designs like one in Singapore with the flashing lights on top, can you really remember any of them as iconic? All of them are so cluttered with stuff, colours and sponsor logos that are easily forgetable. Even Hamilton started with a nice simple yellow and then switched to a white with billion things on it. So in the end let them design whatever they want and change it as often as they like, it doesn’t matter anyway…

    PS: Instead of banning helmet changes because it doesn’t lead to iconic helmets, how about banning sponsors on the helmets. Because nothing screams more iconic than having a giant black stripe that says MONSTER ENERGY, or a white band that says MISSIONSPINNOW…

  31. I think it’s realy a non-discussion. Helmet “designs” are utterly useless these days anyway.

    First of all you can’t really see them well because of the halo.

    If you do manage to see the helmet, the “design” is such a cluttered mess and they all use the same 3 colors. It’s gotten so bad that hardly anyone would be able to actually recognize the driver from the “design” anyway.

    In the “olden” days drivers actually had helmet design’s that served the purpose of being recognizable from a distance. I could recognize almost any driver (bar the newer ones or the back markers) by their the helmet. Especially when sitting in the grandstands around the track.

    Who doesn’t, to this day even, recognize iconic helmet designs like those from Senna, Coulthard, Hill (father and son), Niki Lauda, Hakkinen, Schumacher, Prost, Alesi, Barrichello etc

    These days the designs seem more geared towards attracting buyers who pay a lot of money for a scale model of the helmet.

    Having a different design helmet every race really feels more like a money making scheme for the drivers. Try to get fans to collect all designs. I guess they don’t make enough money from it to pay for the fine, but still.

    1. I was at the USGP and we were definitely identifying drivers by their helmets, very not true that you can’t see them by the halo.

      1. @swracerghost Well it clearly makes it a huge lot more difficult to see. The biggest is the designs. They are just a mess.

  32. The drivers should all pull a Kimi. 2013 Monaco the little troll told Kimi after practice he couldn’t run his James Hunt tribute helmet. Wore it in qualifying the next day anyway.

  33. You dont see the irony of Hamilton and Vettel wearing Niki Lauda tribute helments because we know what Lauda’s helmet was like because he didn’t change it every bl**dy week! Where is the dignity and pride in the personal icon?

    1. Lauda wore different helmets at different points in his career high is exactly why they could wear two different kinds of helmets. Imagine both running the same helmet had he used just one. How is that for confusion? @machinesteve

      1. @thedoctor03 Yet all of Lauda’s designs would have been allowed for him to be used through a single season. They were all still recognizably similar enough.

  34. The rule assumes that most F1 fans are “new” to the sport, which they are not. Ask any F1 fan what their driver wears and they’d know in a heartbeat. As a Vettel fan I used to look forward to his different designs every weekend (“what will he wear this weekend”). Plus if you are watching on TV you don’t even need to spot helmets to see who the camera is zooming on – there is that much info on the screen. If a TV commentator still needs to see the helmet, he/she is not good at their job any way. The only people this remotely affects are those watching the race live who may not want to see the large screens on the track but engage in “driver spotting”. In that case if they really are a proper F1 fan, they’d know anyway. I haven’t even mentioned the large numbers, the halo or the yellow/black cam and I am already feeling I have enough ammunition to debate the removal of this rule.

  35. “We’ll have rules! Lots of rules!”

  36. Sebastian Vettel is the cause for this rule. He’s the only person to be blamed. His confusing helmet liveries that kept changing almost every race during his Red Bull years were getting too much even for us fans. That’s why I’m in support of this rule and believe it should stay. But there should be a big change. Instead of just allowing one event where the driver can use a different livery, there should be three events. I think that will take care of much of the problem. But the rule itself should remain.

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