In 100 years of Grand Prix racing, and 75 years of F1 at Spa-Francorchamps, there has been a plethora of iconic moments and incredible history. One such moment was Michael Schumacher's maiden win, back in 1992.

Our Senior Visual Designer, Sean Bull, talks us through designing this beautiful poster commemorating the moment, as we go Behind the Design on the creative process that brings such a moment to life.

What was the initial spark or idea behind this poster?

With the Belgium poster I wanted to commemorate one of the most iconic moment in the team’s history, and one of our first big ‘Enstone Moments’ - Michael Schumacher’s first win in 1992 in the iconic Yellow and Green of Benetton.

With that iconic moment came an equally iconic photo, the B192 down the Kemmel straight firing sparks into the air.

It was this shot and 90's film camera lens feel that I wanted to emulate, the biggest challenge of this year's poster series that I had set myself, but one that I was keen to push and learn some new skills to achieve the desired effect.

Again, the scene is created in Cinema 4D with the Corona render engine. To get the best results for exterior renders, Cinema 4D's Sun and Sky setup is probably the best in the industry, so a lot of work went into directing this core light, balancing the amount of cloud generation. All of this scene is fully CGI, with no HDRi, photo manipulation or cut-outs applied to the scene.

Once the clouds, sky and sun direction were set, I went to look at building the scene, and one of the most important aspects with Spa is the amount of fans that fill the hills across the main straight, so from this I generated 5 CGI characters and placed them in a random scatter across a hill geometry.

With motion blur applied to the scene it wasn’t that important how these CGI character looked or direction, as long as there was enough colour variation of their clothing to fill a ‘crowd’.

After the crowds were built, the next key aspect from the reference photo was the forest behind, again this was achieved by a random scatter of various European trees applied to a hill geometry.

With this built, and after lots of tweaking on the variation scale and volume of trees, I moved onto the final touches of replicating the smoke flares that fans often let off in the straight, of course in an Alpine blue

This was generation loading a smoke simulation, letting the file run and getting it to a position I was happy with, despite this being a small touch, this was the aspect I was most struggling with, as the smoke was either too thick, too blocky or just not behaving correctly to the shapes and smoke dispersion I wanted, eventually we arrived at this point that I was okay to include.

With those key areas of the scene built, I went to render and applied the post effects for the final, striking, image.

Is there a specific element in this poster that you’re especially proud of?

As always with my work, I love any chance to get retro elements in or make a point of embracing this teams iconic past, and for this the chance to texture and render out the 1992 car with Schumacher’s helmet from the year was too good to miss.

Some slight tweaks were made to the livery to counter the obvious tobacco branding, and from this I had to reference the Tamiya model kit of the era and find the ‘child friendly’ version of the logo, in which the Camel text was replaced with the same font but instead reading out BENETTON: from here I found a matching font and remade the logo myself to re-apply to the livery and Schumacher’s helmet

Texturing and rendering the car went through the same process we apply with our usual car launch renders, with focus spent on getting the tyres, carbon and paint looking as close as possible to the cars of the era, again lots of reference images were gathered to create our version of the B192.

For me this is my favourite poster I’ve been able to create this year, with equally the most work gone into creating it.