Lawson said the chosen design stood out to him straight away.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s bold, full of energy and colour, and encompasses so many things I love about coming home to New Zealand,\u201d Lawson said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m pumped to see it brought to life and even more pumped to wear it on track.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ebbs, 46, said a stop at a dairy with his son had sparked the idea to enter the competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy son is super into Formula One and he saw a poster for a Red Bull competition, and was like, \u2018How do we enter that?\u2018\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I just said, \u2018we\u2019ll give it a go\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ebbs said he worked as a company director but didn\u2019t have a background in design.<\/p>\n
He said that his design was influenced by Lawson\u2019s personal journey, as well as input from his children.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spent a bit of time just looking at the helmets that he\u2019d had in the past and the kind of stuff he liked,\u201d Ebbs said. <\/p>\n
\u201cI settled on pink, blue and white as the main colours, since Liam often uses them on his helmets.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first, I thought of Lightning McQueen, but I ended up focusing on his new love for golf.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt reflects the New Zealand landscape, golf, Kiwiana and Aotearoa itself, to capture Liam\u2019s pride and personality.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started picturing a Kiwi bird in a pink backwards cap driving a golf cart \u2013 I wanted a fun, cartoon-like style that evolved into something more layered, with elements like ferns, rolling hills, clouds, kiwifruit and the shape of New Zealand.\u201d<\/p>\n
A lifelong Formula One fan, Ebbs has passed his passion on to his family.<\/p>\n
As part of his prize, he will be travelling to Singapore with his 8-year-old son, Michael Ebbs, to deliver the helmet to Lawson in person.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe never miss a qualifier or race, and the idea that he\u2019ll be wearing my design is just surreal \u2013 getting to hand it to him ourselves is incredible,\u201d Ian Ebbs said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is incredibly exciting for our family. We\u2019ve followed Liam for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ian Gebbs and his 8-year-old son Micheal will travel to Singapore together to hand Lawson his new helmet. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
The custom helmet will be officially unveiled in the lead-up to the Singapore Grand Prix next month, with the handover taking place ahead of the race weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lawson said the chosen design stood out to him straight away. \u201cIt\u2019s bold, full of energy and colour,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[11671,53252,1341,1120,53253,35719,1687,23226,53256,24560,372,6537,53255,35743,53254,32168,52181,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-109935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-f1","tag-11671","tag-christchurch","tag-competition","tag-design","tag-designs","tag-driver","tag-f1","tag-father","tag-fatherofthree","tag-formula","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-helmet","tag-lawson","tag-lawsons","tag-liam","tag-nationwide","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}