John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports
With F1 headed to South Beach, McLaren driver Lando Norris has the perfect helmet for the weekend
We thought that Lando Norris could not top his custom helmet for the inaugural Miami Grand Prix.
We were wrong.
A year ago, Norris debuted a custom basketball-themed helmet for the Miami Grand Prix. “I saw some people playing basketball one time, and I thought, damn, that’d make for a cool helmet.,” said Norris a season ago. “So I did it. It has some cool details on it, like my signature, my logo and my name in black with a nice neon outline.”
He pulled off the look rather well:
However, he managed to outdo himself with the design for this year’s Miami Grand Prix.
A beach ball:
The detailing is fantastic, right down to the “air valve” located on top of the helmet. Anyone who has spent some time trying to inflate a beach ball on a hot summer day — particularly with some rather impatient children waiting on your efforts — will appreciate that little detail.
Norris himself shared the news on social media, highlighting another impressive detail, which is the “ripple effect” on the helmet, as if the “beach ball” is still being inflated:
Norris is hoping to bring that helmet into the points this weekend. He is coming off his first two points finishes of the 2023 season, having come in sixth in the Australian Grand Prix, and ninth last week in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
There is hope that Norris and McLaren will fare even better in Miami this weekend. When I spoke with Norris last week, ahead of Azerbaijan, he had this to say about the planned upgrades to the MCL60:
“We’ve got a couple new bits on the car which is good, the team’s done a very good job to get them for now. But I think these are the things I think we said we should have started the season with. But we’ve got them now, which I think is the main thing. They should definitely move the car forward. It’s not maybe the best track to show that, and to prove that exactly. It’s a bit more biased, and the places it’ll help improve the car maybe aren’t shown that much on this track, maybe a little bit more in Miami. “
Norris certainly has the helmet for a points finish in Miami, now he’s hoping he’ll have the car to match.
