Helmet gives glimpse into Kanaan’s life
Hair design inspired by childhood friend, handprints from children
This isn’t just a I NDIANAPOLIS helmet. Don’t think that for a second. It’s part battle gear, part time machine and part hair makeover.
Tony Kanaan’s helmet is a 34year-old story still in progress that began with insecurity, developed through confidence and eventually became about family.
It’s his baby. He gets jealous about it. He gets angry when others touch it. It is, by no means, just a helmet.
The story begins with 8-yearold Kanaan and his father in Brazil. Kanaan was beginning to race, and his father told him he needed to think of a helmet design. A helmet tells a driver’s personality, his father said.
Kanaan wanted to look cool, and what came to mind was his best friend Caio’s long blond hair that flowed behind his ears.
“It was all about the chicks,” Kanaan joked.
Caio and his hair were popular with girls. Kanaan’s hair — in his words — was terrible. It grew more up and outward with a wave. It was curly. He said it was more like an Afro.
So he and his father painted a helmet that had streaks of Caio’s blonde hair around his ear and out from his visor. He said he felt so cool. This was his fake hair, his wig.
Did the helmet end up helping with women as planned?
“Well, the helmet helped with the chicks because then I was a driver,” Kanaan said. “He had the cool hair, but I had the cool paintschemed helmet and I was a driver. So I was cooler.”
The helmet colors changed over the years, but the hair paint scheme never did. Kanaan’s own hair, however, did — it got worse, according to Kanaan.
But with that helmet on his head, Kanaan won an IndyCar Series championship (in 2004), an Indianapolis 500 (in 2013) and made a record 270 consecutive starts. He became one of the most popular drivers in the sport.
Kanaan and Caio like to joke about how instead of Kanaan using Caio’s hair to seem cool, Caio now uses his role in the helmet to impress people.
“Nowadays I don’t have long hair anymore,” Caio said through a translator, “so for the people who have known me just from the recent years I have to do some more explaining. But for my old friends, it’s easier.”
While the helmet might not be tangibly improving Kanaan’s performance, he doesn’t shy away from attributing some of his career successes to his headgear.
“It’s like you’re getting ready to go to war and you put on something that protects you,” Kanaan said. “It’s another person.”
Kanaan’s wife, Lauren, keeps telling him he’s a different person with the helmet. Without it, he’s a goofy jokester. With it, he becomes a hyper-focused, serious competitor who just wants to win.
“She says even my eyes change with the helmet,” he says.
While the hair paint scheme remained, Kanaan eventually added more of his heart to the helmet. When friend Alex Zanardi lost his legs in a 2001 crash, Kanaan wore a helmet with the design split in half between his original scheme and Zanardi’s.
Then, Kanaan started his own family. When his son, Leo, was born and Kanaan saw the nurses weigh him and take handprints and footprints, he had an idea. He got a copy and sent it to his helmet painter, who designed the helmet so both of Leo’s hands were printed on the back of the helmet.
It was like Leo was pushing him each time he got in the car. When Kanaan and Lauren had two more children, they made it one hand for each child and put all three on the back with their names.
Kanaan can share the helmet with his children similar to the way he will forever share the helmet with his father. Each time he wears it, he gets taken back to the short time he had with his father, who died when Kanaan was 13. He gets transported back to that first time drawing the helmet together.
Kanaan was 8 and could hardly draw well, so his father did it. “‘How do you want this, Tony?’ ‘Well, you know Caio? You know how his hair kind of flows past his ears? Yeah, like that.’ ”
He can look at that helmet and remember his father helping him start out in racing and see how so much of his success began with that helmet.
“I’m glad I didn’t change it,” he said. “Because, obviously, he was gone very early in my career. Now it’s something I know I did back in the day with him that I can still wear proud today.”