Tamara is a brand new motorcycle rider and Rider Justice has been guiding her to ensure she’s prepared for life on 2-wheels. Immediately after getting her motorcycle endorsement, we brought her out to buy motorcycle gear. In this video, Stevie, the apparel specialist at Erico Motorsports talks to us and to Tamara about how to shop for a motorcycle helmet.
Helmets are the most important thing that you can wear when you’re riding a motorcycle.
Obviously, you want to keep the moneymaker, right? There’s a statistic that I heard when I was doing some Arai training, they were saying that “if you were going 10 miles an hour, and your head hits the ground from 12 inches, without a helmet on, from 12 inches up going 10 miles an hour, it’s the same G-force as being dropped out of a three-story window.” So you don’t have to be going very fast to get really injured.
In Colorado, we have a lot of temperature differences. It gets really hot in the summer, so my recommendation to her was the Arai X Defiant helmet because it is the most well-ventilated helmet that I’ve ever used.
It has vents here that open and close here, here, and one here. If it is a colder day, you can close all your vents and, you know, keep that warmth in. If it’s a warmer day, you can open those vents and allow that airflow to come through without having to leave your visor open because that’ll really dry out your eyes.
If you were to hit the ground, the idea is glancing blows rather than hitting and catching. You want to be able to not get stuck on anything, so there’s no sharp edges, it’s very smooth – so it lessens rotational damage.
Again, you don’t want anything that’s going to catch. You want your head to have glancing blows if it’s going to hit the ground. And when you put it on, I want you to take the straps, pull them out and then down and that’ll save your hair and save your ears.
Stevie: All right, so the tightest that your helmet will ever be is right now, so you want it to be very snug in your cheeks. If you shake your head like that, you don’t want it to bobble around. Do you feel any hot spots, any tightness?
Tamara: Not really, no.
Stevie: What this does is this keeps a lot of the noise out, so having a tight neck roll, so it is a little tight going on, but once you get it on, as long as it feels snug and it doesn’t feel tight. And the more that you wear it, the more that you put it on and off, it’ll kind of break in a little bit. It should feel snug, but it shouldn’t feel like it’s going to give you a migraine.
Tamara: Right. Out of curiosity, the difference between a full-face and a three-quarter-face?
Stevie: I think that it’s far more comfortable to wear a full-face than a three-quarter-face. Not only does it help protect you in the case of an accident, but also just keeps a lot of road debris out of your face.
Tamara: Okay, I do like this color too, yeah.
Stevie: They just came out with that this last year. They call it gunmetal metallic.
Tamara: Okay.
Stevie: Yeah, we can get you all set up.
Tamara: Great!
Stevie: I think that it’s worth investing in your head
New Rider Adventure
See more of Tamara’s adventures as a new rider as well as other gear shopping for motorcycle gloves, motorcycle jackets, and motorcycle jeans.