‘That helmet saved my life’
Ross Clark-Raee is SHARP’s Technical Lead, a role he gravitated to after having his life saved by wearing a SHARP five-star-rated helmet.
“In 2015, I was riding to my job in music management when a van crossed in front of me. I had nowhere to go except into oncoming traffic or into the side of his van. I hit the van.
“When I came to, I found I'd broken both arms, dislocated my thumb, broken all the bones in my left foot and had a couple of other dislocations. It turns out that I'd also broken my back, but because my arms were pointing in the wrong direction, they fixed those first.
“After looking at the state of my lid and speaking to witnesses, the helmet saved my life, no question. The only reason I'd bought that helmet was because it had a SHARP five-star rating and nothing else within my budget had five stars. It was a Marushin RS2 Carbon.
“While I was in the hospital, I started thinking to myself, if I hadn't made it through, would I be satisfied with the mark
I'd left on the world? I didn't really feel that doing what I was doing, massaging the egos of musicians, was important in the grand scheme of things… So I started to learn about SHARP – initially just so I could send them a letter to say thanks.
In doing so, I discovered that TRL was instrumental in creating the scheme and weirdly enough, I’d lived local to them for 35 years. So I made it my mission to work for TRL.
“After months of looking, a very junior coordinator role for the impact test facility became open. On my first day I asked where the SHARP testing happened, and I was told that TRL didn’t do the actual testing. So I made it my mission to ensure that we did do it here.
“It's not just me, far from it, but I can say that we wouldn’t have been doing the testing here at TRL if I wasn't driving them towards doing that. I'm really proud to be doing this work.”