In June 2017 the future 2018 24 Hours Of Le Mans winner and FIA WEC 2015 LM P2 Champion Roman Rusinov asked me to come up with an idea for a new racing helmet that would substitute his old version. The general brief was pretty simple but challenging at the same time: it had to be different. And it all started with generating a concept.

Crash helmets paint design has developed and changed significantly in the last couple of decades. The digital era has opened many possibilities that were not available before and designers started to apply their ideas on the helmets. This lead to extremely elaborate but complicated graphic schemes that are great to watch in detail but that are far from being easy to remember. Majority of contemporary designs are overloaded with details but are lacking a strong theme to hold it all together.

At the same time the classic helmet designs use a totally different approach. The cars were fast and the TV screens were small. The onboard cameras did not exist and the spectators had no time to stare at the helmets of the drivers for several minutes. Instead they had to recognize it at a glance.
This is why most of the best helmet paint designs are extremely bold and easy to remember. The main theme is very clear but the details are minimal and are used to emphasize the dominating motive.

Our main idea for Roman's design was to go back to the roots and come up with a bold and clear theme. Ideally it had to be so simple that a kid could easily reinterpret it in a drawing album.

The solution for the strong theme came from the drivers' name: Roman Rusinov. It's not so often that your first and last names start with the same letter. So we decided to use the "R" as the main graphical element that would unite the whole design and make it bold and easy to remember.

This graphics layout helped to position the sponsors logos in a more organized way breaking the helmet into two zones: The R-Zone and the Sponsor-Zone. The R-zone is the main graphical element and becomes Roman's personal space that is sponsor free. The Sponsor-Zone is the area that is dedicated to sponsors, partners and additional graphics.

After going through several graphical solutions of the selected theme it's been decided to pick two base versions as a final design option: the black main colour with lighter stripes and the orange main colour with darker stripes.

For 2018 season the black chrome base version has been picked and two variations produced:

• The G-Drive orange striped, used throughout the season
• The Gazprom blue striped, used in the 2018 24 Hours of Le Mans