Why F1 was right to drop a pointless restriction

Compared to other major sporting championships, it's quite hard for Formula 1 drivers to express themselves during competition. For safety reasons, they're understandably cocooned in carbonfibre and their machines cover a lot of the work they do to dance the cars onwards at high-speed. Whereas football or rugby players can celebrate a magic moment with their team-mates in real-time, a driver is alone until the end.

The team radio helps - and it has provided wonderful insight since it became ingrained in F1's TV coverage in recent decades. Some drivers, with Fernando Alonso the classic example, have become masters at exploiting this way of expression (although Alonso insists this is a "private conversation" between drivers and their engineers).

Expression is always there in the post-race moments - and there have been some glorious instances in F1's history. From Ayrton Senna climbing aboard Nigel Mansell's Williams at Silverstone in 1991, to Alonso stepping out of his car on the 2012 European Grand Prix in-lap and celebrating in front of his adoring public in Valencia, to the glaring hat-throwing between Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton at Austin in 2015. In that last example, so much expression was quickly sewn into the pieces of fabric the Mercedes drivers chucked around, as well as etched on their faces.

But when the 2020 F1 season does eventually get going, there's going to be an easier (and less petulant way) for the drivers to express themselves. This is because the FIA has rescinded the ban on in-season helmet livery changes, which was first introduced in 2015.

The practice was outlawed after much sniping (and some considered thought about helping fans identify with drivers throughout their careers, with permanent race numbers introduced for the 2014 campaign) mainly about Sebastian Vettel's penchant for constantly changing his Red Bull helmet livery.

In 2016 - in an indication of how unnecessarily restrictive (and one could argue, dangerous) this rule was - it was altered to allow one major change per season for a specific race. But after that the season-starting design had to return.

The Vettel example was regularly cited as a major influence in the rule being introduced in the first place - when Autosport first revealed the plan to ban the practice, we cited approximately 60 times the four times world champion had changed his helmet livery during his Red Bull days.

But last season, when things started to come to somewhat of a head (if you'll pardon the pun), FIA F1 race director Michael Masi explained that there was another factor at play.

"Broadcast media," he said at the 2019 Russian Grand Prix. "It's funny talking to some of the commentators about it. They said the reason why it was there is because of us, because when we're looking down we know who is in the car.

"If we've got someone changing helmets all the time, we've actually got to think and look twice and see who it is, when we're doing a live television broadcast. So there were various reasons why it was brought in.

A very real problem was that the helmet design ban seemed to have become somewhat unenforceable

"At the end of the day, it would require a regulation change. [At the moment] there is your one joker a year, that you're allowed, and when the question is asked, the response is relatively black and white."

After the F1 squads agreed to drop the rule for 2020, it was formally approved at last month's meeting of the FIA's World Motor Sport Council, and will come into effect when the coronavirus-delayed season gets going. But the issue had been bubbling away throughout the years since the ban came in, and it was clear some of the drivers were irked by its authoritarian nature.

Daniil Kvyat called the decision to prevent him running special livery during his home race last season "a joke" (the FIA declared he had already used different colours at the Italian GP earlier that month), and at the race in Mexico two rounds later, Vettel and Hamilton (in a press conference and on social media respectively) called the rule "BS".

Since the halo's introduction at the start of 2018, it has - whatever your views on the device (let's not get into that debate again!) - further shielded the drivers from the outside world, and surely further reduced the need for drivers to maintain a single helmet design.

But if that's a somewhat philosophical argument, a very real problem was that the helmet design ban seemed to have become somewhat unenforceable.

Vettel's initial response to a question on the rule in that Mexico press conference was: "Well, I change it [my helmet design] anyway so..." And indeed in 2019 he had already run a Niki Lauda tribute helmet in Monaco - following the death the triple world champion - as well as alterations in Germany and Italy (a Bernd Schneider-inspired design and the Italian flag colours).

At the same press conference, Max Verstappen said he "always loved when Seb was at Red Bull and changing his helmet every race", adding that "it's your crash helmet and you should be able to do what you want". The idea of stopping a driver from changing their colours to honour someone they love or admire because they have already used an allocation seems, well, cruel.

"At the end of the day we have massive numbers on the side, we have a halo on the top, so let us do what we want with the helmet now," Verstappen concluded. "It's very nice to have a different design every year because it's a bit boring always to keep the same helmet."

When the issue had been raised with Masi at Sochi, he had explained that not all the drivers and teams were consulting the FIA in advance - "Generally those that ask get a response either one way or the other," he said - and so it is now almost a relief that a tedious debate has been ended.

If a driver wants to run a single design for their entire careers - think Graham and Damon Hill's dark blue with white oar blades, or Senna's yellow with green and black bands - that is absolutely fine. But in an age when people still complain about a lack of personality in sport, as well as wider debates about civil liberties and privacy with our highly-developed technology, it just seemed odd to deny a driver the chance to put their stamp on something clearly very personal.

Everyone needs the joy of full expression in their lives and drivers shouldn't be excluded. So, with no sport to celebrate right now, here's to the demise of a pointless restriction.