Esteban Ocon is the first driver to break cover with a special helmet design for the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix, with a slick number for the extended sprint weekend.
It’s a second new helmet in three races for Esteban Ocon after his British GP lid dedicated to all the members of staff at Alpine – but he’ll hope he can show this one off for longer than he got at Silverstone.
Ocon pulled up with an oil leak after just nine laps of the British GP, which was still 162 more corners than he completed at the Hungarian GP as he was taken out by Zhou Guanyu in an incident at turn one.
Don’t bet on Ocon being the last driver to announce a special helmet in Belgium though, it’s a special race for a number of drivers.
Esteban Ocon
After Ocon‘s previous one-off design paid tribute to his team by listing the names of everyone at Alpine‘s Enstone HQ and engine base Viry-Chatillon, this couldn’t one couldn’t be more opposite.
It comes about from his partnership with Bell & Ross watches – confusingly unaffiliated with Bell helmets whose logo also appears on the design.
Alpine are also sponsored by Amazon music, so could we see a cool musical design later in the year? Feels like there’s plenty of scope for that.
Anyway, for the Belgian GP his helmet resembles a watch dial around the visor hinges on either side of his helmet, and it looks pretty in the white-red-grey colour scheme.
And in case you were wondering – because why wouldn’t you be – Bell & Ross’ most expensive watch apparently costs $410,000.
There’s no concrete number for how much an F1 helmet costs but most estimates are around $5,000, meaning you could get 82 Ocon X Bell & Ross helmets for the price of one of their timepieces. Which would you take?
Apparently only six people in the world are rich enough to drop that sort of money on the latter as that’s the number of BR-X1 Skeleton Tourbillon Sapphires that’ve been made, each manufactured from just five blocks of sapphire.
Where is the next F1 2023 race?
With the F1 circus finished in Budapest, we move on to the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix which will be held at Spa-Francorchamps over the weekend of July 28-30.
