IN THE TUNNEL

The testing procedure in the Boardman Performance Centre’s wind tunnel explained

We were lucky enough to gain exclusive access to the wind tunnel at the Boardman Performance Centre for this test, armed with the question, ‘What’s the fastest helmet?’ Yet finding the answer wasn’t a simple case of hopping on the bike and pedalling away.

“It’s an admirable question, but then we need to break it down further to address different speeds, different body positions and different head positions,” says Barney Wainwright, the centre’s Head of Science & Technical Development. “What’s best for one person isn’t best for another. So we need to think carefully about how we test.”

This careful procedure involved producing eight measures per helmet (we took the Specialized, Scott, Poc, Giro, Endura and Bell, and one £30 road helmet – the B’Twin 500 (see image) – and a TT helmet, the ‘gold standard’ Kask Mistral for comparison). These were at two yaw angles of 0° and 10°, and in two head positions (a higher tri-bar position and a lower tri-bar position), and then both were tested at speeds of 35km/h and 45km/h for a 60sec period in the set position.