Whether we like it or not, the Halo will be on the 2018 Formula One cars, much to the disappointment of many fans and even those within the sport. While many fans are fighting the safety addition because of the appearance impact it will have on the cars, among other things, the president of the FIA seems to think that using a different color Halo for the championship leader is a good idea.
It’s unknown where the idea came from, but Jean Todt has backed the idea to change the color of the World Drivers’ Championship winner’s Halo. This would be similar to cycling, in which the previous winning rider wears a different color Halo. I think that you can tell from my tone in the above paragraph, I am very much against the idea for a few reasons.
Primarily, I don’t like the idea of drawing more attention to something that the fans don’t find visually appealing. It’s like if you had a big dent in your car and painted it bright yellow. When it isn’t painted, it’s far less noticeable and you can used to it, but when you paint it bright yellow, it points out an obvious imperfection in the car. Quite frankly, it shows just how out of touch Todt is with the fans that he would even consider an idea of this nature, let alone personally back it.
I also don’t like the idea of it possibly hindering the teams’ design choices. Either the FIA will have to force teams to make the Halo only black (like we have seen in the testing) or they would have to restrict what colors the teams can use on the Halo. For example, if they decide to paint the Halo of the leader yellow, that would stop Renault from using yellow on their Halo, even though it would match the car.
But really, it all comes down to the fact that if the Halo doesn’t match the rest of the car, it will be super ugly. We can see that with the shark fin. The teams that ran the plain black shark fin had much uglier cars than the ones that incorporated the shark fin into their design. That’s the only way that the Halo will look a little bit better and have any chance of being accepted by the fans.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company. Assumptions made in any analysis contained within this article are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the author.
