The race for protection
Bikesport has long shaped our safety kit. Now road tech is giving something back…
Motorcycle racing gives us so much – drama, tension, excitement, a bit of Sunday afternoon hero worship. But even if you’re not a fan, the sport has still benefitted your biking life in many important ways.
If you never ride without a back protector then you’ve got GP legend Barry Sheene to thank. In the wake of his 1975 Daytona crash, Sheene knew that racing speeds had increased so much that riders needed extra protection, so with that thought in mind, he helped pioneer the development of the modern back protector. After high-profile, back protector-wearing riders started walking away from huge impacts, the world started taking notice, and by the mid-1990s back protectors were commercially available to all. It’s a similar situation with rider airbags today; used in GP racing since 2007 and made mandatory in 2018, they’re now widely available in leathers, jackets and vests for road riders – and the cost of the systems is dropping all the time.
Even features of your kit so small that you may not even notice them will have been conceived on the world’s tarmac battlegrounds. Take a look at the palms of your gloves and you may see hard plastic pucks near the heel of your hand – these are scaphoid sliders. On the racetrack they provide extra protection for the notoriously hard-to-heal scaphoid bone in the wrist. However, on the road they also help reduce hand and arm injuries sustained when leather grips the road surface in a crash. Our helmets, too, have undoubtedly been improved by racing; shell shapes, materials, venting and liners, all influenced by lessons learned on the track. Although today something interesting is happening… the tech inside our road lids is inspiring the next generation of racing helmets. Thanks to years of studies into what happens to a rider’s head in a typical road accident and the discovery that rotational forces generated in an angled impact could contribute to serious brain injuries, the FIM has now included an angledimpact test in its homologation standard. This means new helmet technologies that have been embraced by road riders – and which are inspired and underpinned by tests used to reach the new ECE 22.06 standard – have an increasing impact on the helmets worn by our Sunday afternoon heroes.