Pretty much everything they tell you - or warn you - about motorcycling turns out to be true (more on this, and why the safety course is a brilliant investment, in a future post). But some things, you don't find out until you've read between the lines of a hundred magazine articles, or discovered them for yourself. One such topic: helmets.
Most of what you read about helmets focuses obsessively on fit, and on making sure you have the right certification. These things matter, and they mostly determined my first helmet purchase, a Zoan. Not the prettiest lid, but it fit my oddly shaped head more or less (just one little pressure point), had the all important ECE 22.05 blessing, and was a pretty good deal. It never occurred to me for a second there would be any more to it than that.
A second bike necessitated a second helmet (the bikes, you'll recall, are in separate places), and by pure chance I found myself in the middle of a seasonal clearance sale wherein I scored the helmet above, an Arai Signet Q, for less than half of its stratospheric regular price. It fit like mother's love, as if it had been made for me (Arai's oval headform is kind of a thing among North American riders in the know, this being the market Arai created it for). I figured I'd scored a bit of extra comfort, and the status illusion that I was a guy who spent $700 on a helmet.
Then I rode with it, and here was the revelation: it's quiet. Noise, it turns out, is a big deal in helmet selection. I hadn't realized it, but the racket inside that Zoan was amping my anxiety at speed, which made me more tense and the bike therefore more squirrelly. The Arai allows barely a whisper of wind, even with the vents open. All I can really hear is the drivetrain and exhaust of the machine under me. I have mixed feelings about the Snell certification, but otherwise I can say, hand on heart, that this lid improved my riding.
Who knew.
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