Hello, I’m Ayan F9 and my boss called me yesterday to say, “Ayan, we want to do a special on a helmet.” So, I say, “What is it?” So, they have a thick hat, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that Fortnite wants to take a $200 lid and bundle it with a pair of gloves at 50% off so that more people can afford a passenger kit that actually protects their passenger. My first ride was sponsored by CCM Hockey and Guardian World Mits, so I can really get behind that. And it’s up to us to choose which of these lids gets the sale.
Contender 1: Scorpion Covert
My first contender is Scorpion the Defiler, also known as the covert. And no, they don’t all come bearing the white hand of Sauruman. I was there 3,000 days ago when we first covered this transformer and found it a bit Back in 2017, Scorpion’s build quality was not quite as solid as their 5-year warranty. 1,490 grams for polycarbonate was suspiciously light and the legion of channels carved into the EPS layer. Well, it seems special until you realize that all our ventilation hopes rested on the shoulders of two tiny Hobbit vents. It’s a bit like connecting Yellow Knife and White Horse to a 10-lane highway.
But friends, we have not abandoned Reason for Madness in including this lid because it’s looking much better now that it’s $150 discounted. See, Scorpion realized that the chimar attached with rare strength to these rare earth magnets, but the magnets themselves are stuck on with double-sided tape. So, they released the covert FX for those who want this style, but more jaw protection than a sticky note. Scorpion also realized that making the 3/4 portion detachable takes the whole thing from urai to dorky guy in one fell deed. So, they released the Covert 2 that no longer lets you do that to yourself.
And since both of those helmets are upward of $300, this one shall not pass $200, which makes it a pretty solid choice for a passenger helmet, especially if you’re planning on keeping the passenger helmet in your saddle bags. With all the detachable bits, this is the most packable full face around. Of course, the chin bar portion is not safety rated. So, you might consider this for a passenger that you don’t like very much. That of course is only cheap because it looks like an incel’s cosplay. So, let’s look at something that doesn’t look like anything.
Contender 2: HJC i10
Nong Jin Crown actually leaves their logos as removable stickers because they don’t mind looking like any old helmet. Any old helmet is bound to be an HAC anyway. They’re the biggest manufacturer in the world by volume. some million units per year. Designed in South Korea and built by their plethora of cheap labor neighbors, Vietnam in this case, and this case is the i10, made to replace the CL7, which was HAC’s previous most affordable and most popular helmet. We’re compounding layers of economy of scale here.
To give you a sense of what I mean, let’s just look at the cracked detent in this visor. It’s actually stronger than the one on my thousand Arai, which has started to fatigue closed underneath highway wind. Achieving a cracked detent is not complicated. This spring just needs to be very tight. But a tight spring is going to wear away at the notches in this polycarbonate unless the polycarbonate is very thick, which it can’t be unless you create optical aberrations. unless you spend for very highquality material, which you can’t do unless you buy a million of them, which only HJC does. Such is the power of dealing in numbers rather than style. A helmet that is simple but silently sealable.
Now, the i10 is only available in two shell sizes. One for extra small, small, and medium, another for large, extra large, and double XXL. It’s not unusual for a manufacturer to save money by only making two of the expensive shell components and then inserting a wider variety of padding thickness. What is unusual is that the i10 also comes in XXXL XXL and the barely legal X XL. What that means is that anyone with a head larger than a medium has to share an outline with this monstrosity looking like Caillou. So the i10 is a good choice if you have a small passenger or if you want to give your spouse a self-image disorder.
Now the triple XL, quadruple XL, quuple XL sizes belong to the DOT camp and the rest are Snell M2020D. But as Jeff Epstein taught us, we shouldn’t really worry about which side to support when both of them are irredeemable garbage. The only sticker worth caring about if you care about stickers is this one, ECE26. It’s almost identical to the ProRacing FIM standard. And together, they’re the only ones to not only consider linear impacts, but also oblique impacts. Ruling out helmets that convey too much rotational force, which is exactly the type of force that causes your common concussion. It’s a bit like when car makers noticed, hey, these vehicles are great at driving into walls. Maybe we should start looking into how they behave in a rollover. A safety conscious person would want to be on the right side of that change in thinking.
in Scorpion’s riser is ECE 2206 1,640 g and that includes a drop down sun visor, emergency release cheek pad, some thick thumpy vents, and even this visor lock, which doesn’t. Even still, I kind of knew that this was going to be my first choice for a $200 helmet. And I knew that right up until this piqued my curiosity.
The Winner: LS2 Stream 2
LS2 is not the largest manufacturer in the world. They’re the largest manufacturer in the largest country in the world, and that comes with its own flavor of economy. Have you ever seen a quilted pleather chin bar? And would you ever look to such an unseen place to check if it’s quilted pleather? Why would you care if it was? Have you ever felt a 3D mesh liner just for ventilation air flow? And why would you use that rather than cutting free holes in the EPS? And how could you even feel it below the comfort liner? Would you care if the visor used a leverless mechanism just so that you can save approximately 5 seconds on your once every 2ear shield change? Well, Phil cares.
As the virgin to the helmet industry, LS2 always had lots of gumption. They just didn’t know where to stick it. But I loved that. So, I begged my boss to let us think about considering including a much more modern helmet in the discount. This is the LS2 Stream 2. And it also has a drop down sun visor. It also has emergency release padding. It’s also ECE2206. It even has a lock on central locking visor that actually locks.
But unlike their gimmicks of yestery year, this one just gives you KPA. And KPA is LS2’s kinetic polymer alloy. It’s a aramid infused polycarbonate, much like the Kevlar helmets you get around the $1,000 level. Uh, but what that enables is for the shell to be stronger and therefore made thinner. And therefore, this helmet with all of its features, including a ratcheting buckle, only weighs 1,550 g for my size large. And that is a very mature, very grownup way to spend your value.
In a similar vein, LS2 gives us Arum. It’s their advanced rotational energy management system. Basically, the interior padding is spring-loaded. Attenuate some of that rotational impact we are talking about. You might be familiar with a similar system called MIPS, which is built in China, which happens to be where LS2 has their R&D department. H. Now, this helmet is also now an intermediate head shape. The original stream was a long oval. Not great for a passenger lid because it only fits about 20% of the North American population. This one will fit 70% of the biddies that you can pick up at the pub. I think you’ll find that 70% of zero is pretty darn good.
The Bundle
So, this is the best $200 helmet you can buy by far. And as such, this gets our pillion discount. You can click the link below, get this helmet, and we will throw in a pair of gloves at 50% off.
And the gloves I chose, by the way, are these Icon 29ers. I chose them because they’re affordable at 50 bucks, but they have a real cowhide sliding palm. Nothing slides like leather, and it’s very hard to find at this price point. Icon also makes them in a bunch of men’s and women’s sizes because everyone deserves the chance to ride on the back of your bike in safety.
So, that is our passenger kit. Click the link below if you fancy it. Long take. Thank you very much….