Helmet Basics from Impact Racing

One of my friends over at the NASCAR safety group of a large American automaker constantly pesters me to upgrade my safety equipment for motorsports. If I did everything he told me to do, I think I’d have more money in safety gear than car! I took his advice to heart this week when a work trip took me to Indianapolis. I stopped by Bill Simpson’s new motorsports safety venture – Impact Racing – to look into the most important piece of safety gear you can have: a helmet. Impact builds on Simpson’s extensive career of keeping racers alive and their brains and bodies intact with solid product line and helmets that are made in the USA. I talked to the Impact staff to find out if my $500 helmet budget was going to be sufficient and they laid it out on the line for me: you spend money on three things when you buy a helmet, and everything else doesn’t really matter. The first thing you should spend money on is the Snell Memorial Foundation certification. Snell 2005 is the current certification and insures that the helmet meets or exceeds the requirements to keep your brain pan intact when you mistakenly contact your rollbar. All of Impact’s helmets are Snell certified. The second thing you spend money on is fit. A poorly fitting helmet won’t do you any good, and in the case of my old one, will probably hurt. I used to get bruises on my forehead even while being able to stick my hands along side of my head. This in a Snell-certified unit made by a well-known manufacturer! The third thing you spend money on is shell material. Everything from plastic to carbon fiber is used for shells, and you pay accordingly. The Impact line forgoes the cheap plastic variety and starts out with traditional composites. You can expect to spend around $400 for a well-made Snell-certified composite helmet. The next step up is a Kevlar composite that will run you north of $700. For the very well-funded, carbon fiber will set you back $1500 and up, but because the weight in a helmet is in the padding, it’s no where near the weight savings you might expect. I bought a white composite SuperSport, which met my budget constraints and had the required Snell certificate and the great fit I was looking for. I’ll be at Grattan this weekend with my local VW club – see you on the track!