Racing returns this week to the heady heights of Mexico City - Formula One's highest altitude racing circuit on the calendar being at over 2200 meters above sea level! Where sparks fly at such heights, this weeks race poster catches this excitement alongside the iconic car of Enstone's Benneton, the teams first win being at the 1986 Mexico GP.

As we go Behind The Design this week, we sit down and talk to Senior Visual Designer Sean Bull about how he brought this to life.

Did the location or culture of the race influence your concept in any way?

For Mexico I knew from the start of the season in wanted to celebrate the history of the team’s first win, tracing its roots back to 1986 and Gehard Berger taking a dramatic zero pit stop win with four different coloured compound tyres, an iconic racer in f1s history and the teams DNA. I have such a great love for these classic cars, so any opportunity I have had this year to commemorate an occasion or a moment with one of these I have taken instantly.

Texturing and applying the livery, multi coloured tyres and getting it to the same level as our 25 car was a lot of front end work, especially trying to create that more classic worn look on 80s paint, metal and tyre materials compared to the high gloss finish of our current car.

With it being the 86 race, I wanted to bring more elements from that version of the track and blend with todays, so I created the old-style dot-matrix scoreboard/lap counter to display 25 ALPINE – 86 BENETTON as the positions, that tied with the classic start lights, older stands and other elements to give a nod to the elements of the historic version of the track.

Did you experiment with any new techniques or styles for this piece?

With this being inspired by the 80s race and layout, I looked at the camera and lens effects at the time and built my scene, shutter settings and F-stops around that, with the render engine I use in corona it is extremely close to real life, so again as I did with the Monza poster I took careful consideration to study and research how to apply camera settings, movements and processes to mimic some of these 80s long shutter time shots and get that sense of speed, especially on the Benetton.

After this I went a lot further with the post production that usual, trying to mimic 80s film grain, effects and saturation, with a big focus on the fade, flatter highlights and lifted shadows to mimic a more film stock look, a few colour corrections, 3 renders were created and masked together to blend all the elements I wanted in and out of focus, then an experiment with the grain and lens dirt/scratches of the 80s photos as an overlay was applied on top to give it a more historic feel with a result I was very happy with