Every F1 driver’s helmet for the 2023 season

Max Verstappen

“We used different colours to last year, with the red and blue,” Verstappen said of his 2023 design. “I have chosen to go for a bit of a more old-school design, with some small lines and without the glitter.

There are new brands present on Verstappen’s helmet, including the official F1 game’s producer EA Sports, but “the back of my helmet is quite slick and clean” still. The most important change is the addition of a second star to the design, to mark his second world championship title last year.

Charles Leclerc

Ferrari describe this design as “same same, but different”, which is pretty accurate. The white stripes have been thinned out so there’s even more red than before, and the Ferrari logo sits large and proud above the visor. Team sponsors decorate the sides and keep to the red-and-white colour scheme.

George Russell

Russell used to have a Niki Lauda-style all-red helmet, and switched to having a very dark – but not quite black – as the base colour when he joined Mercedes’ line-up for 2022. He then switched to a light blue helmet which complemented the identifying colours on his car last year. For the new season those colours have changed to bright green.

Esteban Ocon

“Dark mode enabled” is how Ocon describes his new helmet. Previously he had gone for bright designs, usually with an orangey base colour, and has added blue in recent years to represent Alpine. Now his helmet is primarily black with red lining that will no doubt look impressive under floodlights in night races. Unless it’s hidden in the darkness of the design, there is very little sponsor presence.

Lando Norris

Some photos of Norris’s 2023 helmet make it look like he’s used black paint, but others look like he’s gone for the weight-saving effect of having bare carbon. Either way, the design is based around the Lando Norris ‘brand’ colours that are black and luminous yellow, and it stands out from the orange car he will be driving.

Valtteri Bottas

Olympic cyclist Tiffany Cromwell designed this helmet for her boyfriend, who is going into his second season with Alfa Romeo. The design harks back to Bottas’s early years in F1 with Williams, with a black top, a large white stripe sloping downwards across either side of the helmet and then a blue base. In testing he used a one-off design intended to look like Bottas himself, featuring a moustache and mullet.

Fernando Alonso

A new team for Alonso means an opportunity to introduce new colours to his helmet, but instead he’s gone for a design harking back to the one he wore on the way to his second world championship in 2006. The colours of the Spanish flag streak across the sides, and the flag of the Asturias region he is from features at the bottom too. The sponsor space is now used by Aston Martin’s own partners.

Kevin Magnussen

Kevin Magnussen returned to the grid last year and retains a similar design for 2023 to the one he wore last season. Much like his team, he has included far more black this season as a result of Haas’s new title sponsor, with the ‘Magnussen’ along the bottom of his design getting a similar treatment.

Yuki Tsunoda

Tsunoda’s helmets have contrasted his car’s livery over the past two seasons. He had a blue-and-orange lid with white details in 2021, then a white-and-orange lid with blue details for 2022. Now he’s turned the orange into an autumn landscape by covering the white base colour with different shades of leaves. The blue remains in the form of huge AlphaTauri logos on either side of the helmet.

Alex Albon

Albon had a transition helmet last year as it continued to include Red Bull design elements and branding while also utilising the Williams livery’s different shades of blue. His 2023 helmet is darker, drops the Red Bull logo and uses neon pink lines to separate the different areas of the design. The Thai flag runs around the back, and most of the sponsors are fitted around the top.