Anouk Wipprecht designs light-up trophies for Royal Delft’s final Formula 1 Dutch GP

Royal Delft has enlisted Dutch FashionTech designer Anouk Wipprecht to create the winner’s and constructor’s trophies for the 2026 Formula 1 Heineken Dutch Grand Prix, the fourth and last time the historic ceramics house will supply trophies for the race at Circuit Zandvoort. King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands will present the winner’s trophy on the podium on Sunday, August 23, inside the Louis Vuitton Trophy Trunk.

Wipprecht, known for merging wearable technology with traditional craft, worked with Royal Delft’s artisans to fit a flexible electroluminescent material inside the trophies’ Dutch lion and number 1 elements. The material lets those details glow from within, turning a fired ceramic object into something closer to a lit-up interface than a static award. “For me, technology is most interesting when it is not only functional, but gives an object a new form of expression,” Wipprecht said. “In this trophy, I translate the dynamics of Formula 1 into light, transforming the traditional ceramic object into an interactive, almost living interface.”

The decoration around that lighting stays rooted in Delft Blue tradition: floral motifs broken up like shards across the surface and rejoined with gold lines borrowed from the Japanese repair technique of kintsugi. The constructor’s trophy pulls from Royal Delft’s historic Pijnacker decoration, pairing deep red, Delft Blue and gold in a nod to the Dutch flag, with the gold lines standing in for the memories the circuit has built up over its run on the F1 calendar.

Wipprecht’s design work has long run through 3D printing. VoxelMatters has followed her projects for years, from the 3D printed SpeakerDress that turns its wearer into a walking sound system to an open-source robotic dress built with Elegoo and a mind-controlled ScreenDress. Across that body of work, 3D printing is less a manufacturing shortcut than a design language: it lets her prototype sensors, electronics and moving parts directly into a garment or object’s structure, then iterate fast on forms that would be difficult to produce any other way. The Royal Delft trophies apply that same instinct to a material she had not worked in before, threading an electronic lighting layer into hand-thrown and hand-painted porcelain rather than a 3D printed shell.

For the second- and third-place trophies, Dutch DJ and producer Don Diablo, born Don Pepijn Schipper, painted a design that rises from a traditional Delft Blue landscape of windmills and sailing ships into a sky filled with hexagons, a recurring motif from his HEXAGON label. He said the windmill motif refers to his childhood in Drenthe, where he grew up next to one, and the maritime imagery is also a quiet nod to his family name.

Every trophy in the collection is made and painted entirely by hand at Royal Delft’s atelier in Delft, the last Delft Blue factory still operating from the 17th century. The brand has kept that continuity by pairing its craftspeople with outside collaborators on other pieces, including work with Moooi, Marcel Wanders and the Miffy brand Mercis, and by continuing to update its production and decoration methods rather than freezing them in place.

This will be the fourth and final Royal Delft trophy collection for the Dutch Grand Prix, closing out a run that began after Zandvoort returned to the F1 calendar. Formula 1 confirmed in 2026 that the race would end after this edition following a one-year contract extension.