When people first see VALO Gallery, the question I get most often is some version of: “Why no drivers? Why no cars? Why no teams?”
It’s a fair question. Formula 1’s commercial identity is built on personalities — Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari red, Red Bull’s bull. The most viral F1 content is about people and teams. The most searched F1 merchandise is driver-specific.
So why am I drawing maps?
The Practical Reason First
Formula 1 driver likenesses, team names, and logos are all commercially protected. Selling a poster of Max Verstappen requires a licensing agreement with his management. Selling a poster with the Red Bull logo requires a license from Red Bull. These licenses cost money that a small independent print shop doesn’t have access to, and the companies that hold them enforce them.
Circuit layouts are different. A map is a geographic representation. The shape of Spa-Francorchamps is not a trademark. The geometry of Suzuka is not a brand asset. I can draw the circuit, name it correctly, and sell prints of it without clearance from Formula One Management.
This is the practical reason VALO focuses on circuits. But it’s not the only reason.
The Aesthetic Reason
Circuit layouts have something that driver portraits and car photography don’t: pure geometry.
When you reduce Spa-Francorchamps to its essential lines — the long straight, the compression of Eau Rouge, the sweeping Pouhon, the Bus Stop chicane — you get something that functions as both information and abstraction. Someone who’s watched Formula 1 for twenty years recognizes the shape instantly. Someone who’s never seen a race can appreciate it as a graphic form.
That duality is what makes circuits worth illustrating. They communicate to the initiated and remain visually interesting to everyone else.
Driver portraits don’t have this quality. They require recognition to work — you either know who it is or you don’t, and if you don’t, it’s just a picture of someone you don’t recognize. A circuit has intrinsic shape that carries meaning regardless of whether you know the sport.
What Makes a Good Circuit to Draw
Not all circuits are equally interesting to illustrate. Some have shapes that work immediately — they’re visually distinctive, the geometry is clear, the character of the track comes through in the outline.
Spa works because the relationship between Eau Rouge and Raidillon creates a visual tension in a two-dimensional rendering. You can feel the elevation change even in a flat illustration.
Suzuka is one of the hardest and most satisfying. The figure-of-eight is immediately recognizable, but getting the proportions right is technically demanding. If the crossover point is off by a few degrees the whole thing reads as wrong.
Monaco is almost too obvious — the harbor section and the tunnel complex are so distinctive that it draws itself. The challenge with Monaco is making it feel considered rather than default.
Monza is a study in restraint. Most of the circuit is straight lines interrupted by two chicane sequences. The temptation is to add detail that isn’t there. The correct response is to leave it empty and let the speed of the layout speak.
Singapore is underrated as a visual subject. The Marina Bay circuit is nocturnal, urban, and angular in a way that’s different from every other street circuit. The skyline context makes it worth drawing.
The Cycling and Other Sports Expansion
The same logic that applies to F1 applies to cycling and other sports. The Tour de France doesn’t have commercially protected route shapes — the profile of a stage, the path through the Alps, the outline of a mountain stage — these are geographic facts, not brand assets.
The Copenhagen print that started the cycling collection came from this realization. Copenhagen as a cycling city has a particular character. The bicycle as a form has geometric elegance. The combination felt worth exploring as a print.
Golf courses have a similar quality to racing circuits — the layout of Augusta National, the Old Course at St Andrews, Pebble Beach. Recognizable shapes with intrinsic spatial logic.
The common thread in everything VALO makes is: place over person. Landscape over personality. The thing that lasts after the moment has passed.
Why I Think This Is the Right Approach for a Small Brand
Driver-focused merchandise is saturated. The official Formula 1 store, every major marketplace, hundreds of independent sellers — they all make Verstappen merchandise, Hamilton merchandise, Ferrari merchandise. The market is vast and the competition is proportionally vast.
Circuit art is a smaller market. But it’s also less contested, better differentiated, and appeals to a buyer who isn’t looking for official merchandise — they’re looking for something that belongs on a wall rather than something that belongs in a fan collection.
That buyer pays more, needs less reassurance, and is more likely to buy something they’ve never seen before.
The circuits are not a workaround. They’re a genuine creative position.