© Getty ImagesBulls’ Guide To: HelmetsEver wondered how an F1 driver gets a new helmet? Wonder no more…
AtthedawnoftheWorldChampionshipera,theconceptofheadprotectionforaFormulaOnedriverextendedtoaleathercapandgoggles.It’sreasonabletosaythat,overthelastseventyyears,thesciencehasmovedonabit.
The leather caps were soon superseded by cork-stripped caps with a fabric cover. These in turn gave way to fibreglass open-face helmets – and then full face helmets.
At the start of this century, carbon composites became the construction material of choice, with the standards even increasing through the addition of Kevlar inners, Zylon plates and a hundred other minor tweaks and adjustments designed to push the boundaries of safety just that little bit further ever year – though this tends to be difficult to spot beneath the custom paintwork.
The Top Of Max's Schuberth Helmet© Getty Images
Like much in F1, the high-tech nature of helmets doesn't necessarily imply computerised manufacturing. F1 helmets are hand-made by highly skilled professionals, frequently operating out of tiny workshops.
Constructed from carbon composite layers, making a complete helmet may take two or three people a full day – which limits the output of top-of-the-line helmets to hundreds rather than thousands for the manufacturers like Schuberth, Stilo, Bell and Arai that work in F1.
The finished helmet has a lot to do. The latest FIA 8860-2018 standard subjects it to a medieval torture-chamber’s worth of tests: crush tests with a 10kg weight falling 5m onto the helmet; penetration tests with high-speed 4k impactors (shell) or air rifle pellets (visor); a ballistic test that fires a 225g steel disc at 250km/h at the helmet; being passed through a 790°C flame without catching fire.
The helmet has to be strong enough to survive anything thrown at it – but equally, sufficiently absorbent to not transfer the shock of that impact to the drivers’ head. It has to work equally well for the different energy properties of both high and low-speed impacts. It’s a difficult balancing act – but F1 sets deliberately difficult standards, safe in the knowledge that the research done to meet them will trickle down and eventually benefit everyone who wears a lid on the track or on the road.
Elite level racing helmets, however, are not quite like those on sale in the shop at the local circuit. They feature access ports for drinks tubes and radios, and below the energy absorption foam, they have a final layer custom-formed based on a laser scan of the drivers’ head. They are, essentially unique – except perhaps for the drivers’ own spares.
Helmet design seems an odd subject over which F1 would be at loggerheads – but seasoned F1 observers will note that there is no subject within the sport incapable of starting an argument.
Last Minute Adjustments To The Lid© Getty Images
Early in the last decade F1 developed a vogue for the one-off helmet design. Rather than keeping a design – or variations on a theme – throughout their careers, drivers were commemorating special events (and, it must be said, generating additional interest for their personal sponsors) by driving in one-off designs. Sebastian Vettel was the most extreme, having a different helmet design every weekend.
The FIA decided to clamp down on this and, for 2015 onwards, drivers were required to stick to ‘substantially the same livery’ for a whole season, with only one single-race exception allowed during the year.
The FIA’s core argument centred on the idea that switching designs every week made it very difficult for TV viewers (also commentators) – and particularly live spectators – to tell the drivers apart in the split second a car flashed past.
Featuring more prominent numbers on the car helped – but the human brain processes colour information much faster than it does numerals: telling Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher apart when they were wearing, respectively, yellow and red helmets was relatively straightforward; when Schuberth at Spa presented Schumacher with a gold (for which, read yellow) helmet to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his F1 debut, it became rather more tricky to separate the pair – particularly given they finished the race only a second apart.
The drivers’ counter argument – and there was a rarely seen level of consensus on the matter – was that the rules unfairly restricted one of the few areas in which they could exercise some freedom of expression. Latterly, they added an argument that, with the addition of the Halo, it was very difficult for trackside spectators to see their helmets anyway.
There’s been a reasonable amount of grumpy civil disobedience, with the regulation, if not specifically broken, then certainly bent to breaking point on several occasions – usually around the theme of quite what constitutes ‘substantially the same’. Eventually, the drivers wore the authorities down and, for 2020, the one-change rule was rescinded.
Drivers draw inspiration from many sources for their helmet design. National colours obviously dominate – but because drivers tend to choose their basic liveries in their teenage years, everything from in-jokes to hero worship can sometimes follow them through a career. In one-off designs it’s often a track- or location-specific element that becomes prominent. This is the basis on which drivers tend to have conversations with their artist.
The artistic process for creating a new helmet livery isn’t simply a case of the driver scribbling a few ideas down and handing them over to his artist of choice. There are sponsor obligations to fulfil, team requirements on branding and colour coordination, plus a host of other considerations.
The design process isn’t simply a case of arriving at an agreeable scheme. There are practical considerations as well. Weight, for example, is a big issue. Chrome is frowned upon because it’s heavy. Likewise, everyone is keen to not use too much paint. It may only add a few grams – but teams work hard to shed those grams from the car and don’t want to add it back unnecessarily.
The workflow for the design process varies from supplier to supplier. Sometimes artists will receive the finished helmet to work with.
Beyond the basic design of the helmet, there’s all sorts of proprietary add-ons that come direct from the team. In open-cockpit racing, the driver’s helmet is obviously an aerodynamic surface, and thus the design takes account of that with various spoilers and wings designed to prevent lift and channel air efficiently both around the engine cover and also into the airbox.
In the past, Adrian Newey has expressed a strong preference for Arai helmets, and thus it’s an Arai shape the Team uses for its wind tunnel model. Max, however, wears a Schuberth lid. He switched at the beginning of 2019 pre-season testing because Arai did not yet have a helmet homologated to the latest standard in a size he found comfortable. Schuberth did have a helmet in Max’s size homologated to the new and incredibly stringent FIA 8860-2018 standard. He wore it in testing and opted to stay with the manufacturer subsequently.
F1 drivers will typically have at-least a prime and a spare helmet in the garage. They may be configured with different visors and vent configurations to cope with different environmental conditions (for instance, different rubber gaskets to seal some of the vents in particularly wet weather) but the reason a driver usually swaps his helmet during a session is to deal with a faulty radio.
Max's Lid With Different Visors© Getty Images
Over the course of a season, a driver may get through a dozen or more helmets – regardless of whether they’re allowed different liveries or not. Like the other forward-facing surfaces on the car, racing at 300kph+ tends to lead to create various marks and nicks in the (thin) paintwork but unlike the chassis, a helmet can’t be taken away, scraped down and repainted.
Also, driving an F1 car is hot, sweaty work. Even though they wear a balaclava, the soft inner lining of a helmet becomes pretty fragrant after a couple of grands prix: think of doing a heavy workout and then accidentally leaving your gym kit in the bag for a couple of weeks…
The helmets are expensive – far more so than a road lid – costing anything between €4,000-€7,000. F1 drivers, however, generally aren’t paying for their kit, all having sponsorship deals with the various suppliers, delivering them a specified number of helmets each season.
Where do old helmets go? Mostly into display cases. Drivers and teams keep favourites, either at home, in the factory, or, for a lucky few, on display in the team’s motorhomes at the track. Others go to sponsors and many end up the subject of furious bidding at charity auctions. The Wings for Life charity has benefitted greatly from Red Bull drivers donating helmets: when Sebastian Vettel’s 2013 German Grand Prix-winning helmet was auctioned at Bonhams, it raised £72,100.
Checo Strapping On His Helmet© Getty Images
