Helmet Design: Chris

I first of 4 part series, we thought it would be interesting to get the drivers to explain their individual helmet designs. So first up is Chris.

I didn’t really have a clear design idea for the helmet but knew roughly what colours and overall style I wanted.  I wanted blue white and yellow to be the main colours with some shading in orange and visibility of the carbon shell (well it would be a shame to cover it all up).

I wanted the helmet to look like a car helmet, as opposed to a motorbike helmet but not to use the traditional car roundel style (like Sennas helmet for example).  When I first met Rich (From Rich Art) we talked through those things and also decided that some depth to the design would be good.  Shading and finer details, so seeing the helmet close up reveals more design whilst still keeping something quite bold from a distance.  Rich has many of his helmet designs on his iPad so we spent some time picking out ideas and styles.

Rich took the ideas away and developed a first pass sketch of his idea.  He does these by hand and they are a work of art in themselves.  The first sketch had orange as one of the main colours whereas I wanted more yellow with orange shading.

In the second sketch yellow become a main colour and Rich also incorporated a big Y shape for Yarwood.  At this stage some of the details at the front reminded me of iron man or storm troopers for some reason (funny how your brain works) so these were dropped in the third design.

From the third sketch Rich painted the helmet with plans to use gold and orange honeycomb patterns.

I’m really pleased with the way it has turned out, the design process was really fun and the finished article is just what I wanted.  It now just needs to be seen on the top step of the podium 🙂