Even though I'm a tradtionalist, I really wouldn't mind drivers picking their own number. It gives them a little more of an "identity". F1 used numbers based on the order of entry of cars to appear. Sometimes the local team got the lowest numbers. Sometimes they were all odd, or all even, or like the 1952 and '53 German GP's, they did the triple-digit thing:
Still, with F1, few numbers are attached to drivers. Stirling Moss ran with #7 a lot of the time, and Gilles Villeneuve sued #27 quite a long time with the Scuderia. (Although, in 1980, he used #2, but that 312T5 car was a dog...everyone remembers the Gilles of 1978-79, and the CK126 of 1981-82.) The thing is, even in NASCAR's elite category...eventually, numbers are going to have to be re-used. Richard Petty's car still runs with #43, although for a few years after his retirement, nobody used it. The number 3 can't be the only number reserved forever. Or will it? (I suppose that's a discussion for another thread.)
What about Ayrton Senna? Did plenty of winning with car number 12, then 1 (naturally), then 27, and 8..because in mid-1973, that's how F1 went with the next numbering system. World champ gets the 1, his teammate the 2, and everyone more or less stays put, unless they enter
more cars than fit in their allotment.
Because of this discussion I just checked something that left me puzzled. Because I know that Jackie Stewart left the sport with his last title (1973), I went to check if #0 and #2 had been also used in 1974's Tyrrels. Turns out they weren't.
- Tyrrel kept their #3 and #4
- No #0 car
- Lotus used #1 and #2 with, respectively, Ronnie Peterson and Jackie Ickx.
I tried to find an answer for this oddity but had no luck.
Actually, Ronnie Peterson was the last non-world champ driver to regularly race with the Number 1 on his car. But who was the last? John Watson, when he subbed for an injured Niki Lauda at the 1985 European GP at Brands Hatch:
John Watson McLaren European GP Brands Hatch 1985 by festerchinley at Flickr
(Oh, what would have happened had Alain Prost been happier at Renault in 1983? Would Wattie be driving that Number 1 car for McLaren on a permanent basis? Who knows...)
There's also one other time the Number Zero was raced...in 1973, McLaren ran a third car for a couple of races, sometimes using the number 30, but also a zero for two races:
It was Jody Scheckter driving, and then went to Tyrrell the following year. And like Damon Hill, he eventually became World Champion. Not so unlucky, after all?
And if you'd like to see what numbers have been the most successful, play around with
this site (it might make your eyes hurt, though). Anyone up for using #208 again?
As for the helmets...enforcement is a bad idea. Let them free to make their helmets as ugly as they wish. That said, very few use "simple" designs anymore, most drivers have an unrecognizable mish-mash that can't be discerned at high speeds, but that's just my two cents. Once they're famous, the design doesn't really matter much to attract sponsors to continue their climb up the racing ladder; they can do what ever they want because they're famous already. The only way I can tell Vettel's helmet is by seeing that Webber's traditional yellow above the visor, so it must not be him.
Lewis Hamilton has one of the simpler designs, and Bruno Senna, naturally. Sponsors have taken up more helmet area, and to be fair, the higher cockpit sides block more of the viewable area. Looking at those older photos above show just how out-of-control and scrambled helmet painting has become...but really, I think the FIA be worried more about helmet safety standards, rather than colors and arbitrary rules like that.
). It's basically the only way to see other than recognizing the helmet colors, team, and T-cap color. Although it works well on factory Mercedes team, yellow T-cap and bright yellow helmet for Rosberg, Red T-cap and obviously red helmet for Schumacher! 
