Max Gifford didn't set out to invent a collectible. He was sitting on his sofa, talking to his wife, when the two loves his dad handed him as a kid — Star Wars and Formula One — collided in a single word.
"Lando… Mando," he remembers thinking. "A light bulb went off in my head. I immediately ran upstairs and started drawing."
That sofa moment is the perfect illustration of why crossover collectibles are the most exciting corner of the hobby right now. When two fandoms meet on one object, they don't just add audiences together — they build something neither side had before. Today, Max is the only person on Earth holding a Mandalorian-style Lando Norris F1 helmet signed by Lando himself. There are five of these helmets in existence. He made all of them.
Two Fandoms, One Catalyst
Max's story starts the way a lot of great collections do: with a parent. His dad sat him down in front of Star Wars when he was young, and in front of an F1 race just as young. Both loves have run in parallel ever since — through university, through meeting his wife (now arguably the bigger Star Wars fan of the two), through a memory he describes as useless for everything except "specific Star Wars story moments and F1 race outcomes."
He started building Star Wars costumes in 2022, debuting a crude first Mandalorian suit at that year's Comic Con. "Looking back, did I really feel good about that?" he laughs. "But that's how you learn — you create things, and you get better over time."
The helmets came later, and they came from obsession, not a business plan. He loved Lando Norris's real F1 helmet design — "one of the coolest, most unique designs I've seen in a long time" — and F1 livery is one of the few places a driver gets to be personally expressive. The Mandalorian silhouette happened to be the ideal canvas for it.
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Max in one of his Mandalorian-styled Lando Norris "Landolorian" helmets
The Collector's Lens on a Crossover Collectible
The best way to judge any piece — a card, a comic, or a one-off prop helmet — is through the "Big Three": condition, rarity, and provenance. Max's work scores unusually high on all three, which is exactly why these crossover collectibles are starting to turn heads at conventions and trackside.
Condition comes down to craft. Working out of a two-story flat with no room for a spray booth, Max builds everything with an FDM (filament) printer and standard PLA, then finishes each helmet with rattle cans — no air gun, no professional spray rig. The results rival shop work, and he's blunt about where the quality actually comes from:
- Prep beats everything: He sands from 100 grit all the way up to 4,000, but the secret is a high-build spray putty (he uses Motip) that fills the print lines early and cuts sanding time by half or more.
- Chrome is the boss level: The gold "championship" helmet was the hardest build he's done — chrome is notoriously unforgiving with rattle cans.
- He designs for wear, not just display: Each helmet takes a small USB battery pack, and internal fans velcroed inside, one aimed at the top of the head and one at the mouth, so it stays wearable for two to three hours at an event.
Rarity is where crossover pieces get interesting. Max has made only five Landalorian helmets total — four commissions plus his own original — and each one is slightly different by hand. He's also working through other drivers: a Lewis Hamilton finish he calls one of his best, a Max Verstappen, and an Oscar Piastri, currently in progress. A planned "nighttime" Lando is an inverse of the current design — black-on-green flipped to green-on-black, wrapped in a glittery finish.
Provenance is the one that separates a nice build from a genuine collectible — and Max has the story every collector dreams about.
The Signature That Almost Didn't Happen
At Silverstone, there with McLaren, Max didn't know he'd be meeting the drivers that day — let alone both of them. When the chance came, he was told he could only get one item signed, and the helmet behind him was all he had brought.
"I was like, I'm not giving up the chance," he says.
Lando signed it. Then Oscar Piastri, gracious about the whole thing, signed it too — and immediately asked where his helmet was. ("It's in the works," Max told him. "Your design's just not as simple, man.") Both drivers, he says, were "incredibly interested and appreciative of what I'd made, which is all I could ever ask for."
That helmet is now retired from public life. It's stored at home and, eventually, "going into a sealed box and never leaving it." It's the one that grew his following, put him in front of MasterCard and McLaren, and got him signed by two F1 drivers. As he puts it: other people might one day own a Landalorian helmet and even meet Lando with it, "but I was always the person who had the original one and got it signed."
The original Landolorian helmet, signed by Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri
There's a lovely footnote here about how value really works. When Max had to make a fresh helmet for a recent Comic Con, one of his commissioners told him to simply wear theirs to the event and ship it later. That buyer now owns something no one else has: a Landalorian helmet that's been worn at an event by its maker, stamped with a "#1." In collecting, a story like that isn't a footnote — it's the whole point.
Why the Story Is the Asset
Ask any seasoned collector what makes an object valuable, and they'll eventually land on the same answer: the story. A signature adds a few thousand dollars, sure — but a signature with documentation, photos, and a genuine origin adds far more.
Max gets this instinctively, and it shows up all over his home. On the "wall of weapons" behind him sits a God of War Leviathan Axe he built in a single week, finishing the paint the night before an event so the game's four main cast members could sign it. It went straight from the signing table back home and has "never seen the light of day" since. He didn't make it to sell. He made it because the game mattered to him and his wife — she played it start to finish while he watched over her shoulder — and the cast's reactions were the whole reward.
That's the difference between accumulating and collecting. And it's exactly the kind of context that turns a homemade prop into an heirloom.
Cataloguing a Collection That Spans Fandoms
Here's the practical challenge for a collector like Max: his shelves don't sit in one lane. There's the Lego that started it all (including his dad's boxed vintage Corgi and Dinky toys, and the McLaren Technic set he recently fell for), a fast-growing F1 trading card binder he started at Silverstone with Topps, a serious board game collection, and the helmets themselves. Different categories, different values, different storage needs — and all of it worth tracking properly, because as Max knows from the Lego world, values can swing overnight. (Ask anyone who bought a big £500+ set for a rare Captain Rex minifigure, only to watch a ~£10 microfighter ship with the identical figure less than a year later.)
This is precisely the problem the Collectibles.com app was built to solve. Instead of a mental inventory and a shoebox of receipts, you can catalogue every piece, log its condition and value, and — the feature Max would love — build galleries: digital showrooms that split a collection by theme, so your McLaren cards, your Ferrari cards, your Star Wars Lego, and your F1 helmets each get their own display and running count.
Start Tracking Your Collection →
Max's Advice for Building Your Own
For anyone tempted to pick up a printer and start making crossover pieces of their own, Max's guidance is refreshingly unglamorous:
- Don't overbuy the printer: Skip the do-everything machines. "If your purpose is to do something like what I'm doing, just get something that can print smoothly and print fast." You'll be sanding and painting anyway.
- Never skip the prep His biggest early mistake was rushing to the finished product. Shortcuts on prep always showed up in the final piece.
- Do it for the love, not the money: "If you're going into it for a monetary reason, you're not going to have fun with it. If it genuinely brings you happiness, that's the only thing that matters."
It's the same ethos that made the Obi-Wan Starfighter set his dad brought home decades ago worth more as a memory than it ever would be sealed in a box — and the reason Max's helmets feel like art even though he's too modest to use the word.
Watch the Full Interview!
We covered a lot with Max — but the best moments didn't fit on the page. Hear the full story of the Silverstone signing, the God of War axe, the great Lego value debates, and why he thinks crossover fandoms are bigger now than ever.
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Whether you're just starting the hobby or already on your way to building a serious collection, Collectibles.com offers a super app to easily organize, manage, value, and showcase everything you own — all at your fingertips.
