A couple of years ago at the Sea Otter Classic I spoke with Jacob Rheuban the founder/owner/CEO of Prevelo Cycles. Prevelo, in case you’ve missed our mentions, makes kids bikes that don’t weigh as much as a Tesla battery. I genuinely think they are the best designed and made bikes for kids on the market. Jacob, whose previous career was as a lawyer, is a man of rigorously rational opinions. Put another way, I love talking to him. And he said something to me that I not only couldn’t argue with, I found I didn’t want to.
He told me how he believed that kids should wear full-face helmets. My initial reaction was to ask if that might make cycling less interesting to kids. His response was to grab his sons’ helmets and ask me to look at where all the scuffs and scratches were. With the exception of one scratch on the back of one helmet, all the marks were on the chin guard.
Prosecutions rests, your honor.
I bought both my boys full-face helmets.
This winter, my eldest son, Philip, who is riding with the Devo squad of his local NICA team (the A-Team), began wearing the new Lazer Chase Kineticore Helmet. This is a full-face helmet that weighs 990g and features 11 vents, giving it a level of ventilation that makes it suitable for enduro riders—not just downhillers. It comes in a whopping five sizes, so getting a good fit is easy to do. It got five stars from Virginia Tech and is ASTM certified. They offer a crash replacement program. Good things all, but what got me interested in this helmet was Lazer’s use of their new KinetiCore technology.
KinetiCore is method of shaping the EPS foam so that a latice of channels runs through the first few millimeters of EPS, effectively creating room for the EPS to deform in the event of an impact. In theory, it provides some of the same protection from rotational forces that MIPS is designed to offer.
Philip told me that breathing during a hard effort was easier than with his previous full-face helmet, a Bell Sanction, but that he’d prefer not to have a chain guard if it was all the same. I told him the same it was not and I’m not sure he entirely believed me until this past weekend. We were on a ride he requested to go on, and while descending the trail that he chose (OMG, I am LOVING life), he forgot to put his seat down (We were on his first ride with a dropper post and what does everyone do when they first get a dropper post do? Forget to put the seat down.) He hit a rock with his rear wheel and that bumped his saddle into his butt and suddenly—
Oh look, he’s headed off the exposed side of the trail that drops 20 or so feet to a creek.
Even though I watched the entire event, I still don’t know how he went from having his back to me to hanging on to two trees—two trees that saved him from dropping another 15 feet to the creek—and facing the trail.
I relate all this because his head did whack one of the trees, hard enough that we spent some time with a very nice doctor who once gave my other son stitches.
Inside the chin guard a very dense foam lines the sides, though it’s open at the grill in the front. That foam took all of the impact so far as I can tell. Put another way, there are a few scuffs on the polycarbonate shell, so while I can tell that the helmet has made contact with something, I can’t find any indication inside the helmet that there has been any impact at all. I’m impressed.
I’m supposed to mention that the Chase KinetiCore goes for $199.99. Given what high-end road helmets can go for, this amazes me.
Final thought: Philip is now a believer in full-face helmets.