Despite being implemented to remove the causes of recent high-profile fatalities in Single Seater racing, the Halo has been criticised for looking awful, making it harder for drivers to extricate themselves from their cars and making it harder to see the drivers, and identify them. But, can the Halo be used to make identifying the drivers better? Of course it can.
The teams have been forced to make the numbers larger and visible on the cars, and the T-Cams are different colours (barely), but the Halo obscures the drivers helmet, meaning even teams like McLaren, which has two drivers with different helmet colours, is hard to tell apart.
So why don't we paint the Halos different colours on each car?
Before the season, there was concept art going around showing Halos designed to look like a driver's individual helmet, therefore making identification very obvious. This works at a team like Ferrari, where the drivers paint them differently, but teams such as Red Bull, which share around 75% of the helmet the same colour, this wouldn't work.
Therefore, F1 needs to implement a rule that forces teams to paint the Halos on their two cars a different colour. There needs to be no regulation saying which colour they must be, but most teams will go for something that blends in with the rest of the livery. Shown below is an example of this I made, done with the Mercedes team.
Hamilton drives with a silver Halo, while Bottas has a Petronas blue one.
Once you have learned which driver has which colour, identifying a driver when you see their car instantly becomes a lot easier. The halo is much bigger than the helmet and much more visible from the Grandstands, so is not as hard to see as a tiny yellow T-Cam.
Here's McLaren to show this off too.
By changing the colours of the Halo in this way, it removes one of the problems it causes for fans of driver identification. In fact, it will do it far better than we had in the last few years without the Halo. The Halo gets a lot of unjustified hate, so any way to use it positively while it hasn't yet proved itself to people will do everyone a load of good.
This brings me back to the first picture in this article. Williams and Sauber have both got very similar white and red liveries, that especially from the front, look very similar. With a little coordination, the Halo can be used as an extra method to differentiate the two. With Williams using a Blue and Grey Halo, and Sauber using White and Red, they are more distinguishable apart from each other.
The Halo is here to stay until something better can be designed. It looks bad, but aesthetics is not an excuse for removing a life-saving device. It has had no effect on the racing this year, and the sooner teams and rule makers to solve the minor complaints shouted with loud voices from the fans, the better. This is one solution that would make the Halo a more positive addition.
But anyway, here's some more photos of the rest of the grid with coloured Halos.
What do you think about this idea? How else would you like the drivers to be distinguished on track? How else can we make the Halo look better, while retaining it's life-saving design and purpose? Comment below...
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