Bell Helmets recently launched the Moto-9 Flex. The helmet is designed with new technology to protect the needs of dirt bike and off-road riders, and Bell says the new technology is “game changing.” With nearly three years of R&D behind the Flex technology, Racer X wanted to know what goes into developing a new helmet, and how Bell does it differently in comparison to other helmet companies.
We recently sat down with Bell Powersports’ vice president of product creation, Mike Lowe to find out more. It’s worth noting that Bell Powersports is the motorsports division of BRG Sports, which also owns brands like Riddell, Giro, Blackburn, and C-Preme. In short, the company has deep resources and hundreds of employees, many of whom are dedicated to designing and building better helmet protection.
Racer X: What is your background in terms of training?
Mike Lowe: I’ve been in the helmet industry for over twenty years. My education is in industrial design, but I also have a lot of product development experience. So, from that standpoint, I guess you could say that I have a lot of engineering street smarts.
How long have you been with Bell?
I’ve been with Bell my whole career, starting out with Giro Helmets. Giro was just a bike company back in the mid nineties, but was owned by Bell. I was with them as we moved to snow helmets, and then merged Bell and Giro into one company and reacquiring the power sport brand back from the Europeans. I think that was sold off during the mid-1990s or so, but then we bought it back. And now I’m fully focused on just supporting Bell Powersports’ product development.
With you guys owning Riddell, do you have any experience with the football helmets as well?
We’ve touched football, but I was never full-time with the brand. We work very closely with Riddell, which is our sister company in Chicago. Actually, some of the rotational testing we’ve done took place in their lab with their impacter. The team-sport product creation was in our group as well in Scotts Valley. I was running that with hockey, baseball, and the cross helmet. I’ve been able to work on quite a few different types of helmets and different materials over the years. We can kind of mash some of those technologies together, like fit systems from our snow helmets going into our Bell Pit Boss, which is our kind of shorty-style helmet. Learning our flex technology really started off with a segmented liner called the Bell Segment, where it kind of adapts to proportion. The Flex started out as us asking, “How do we get that technology in a rigid-shell system?” And then it just kind of blossomed into the Flex technology we know today.
So it still uses the regular Moto-9, but it’s just essentially a new interior?
Yes, it’s the same exterior tooling for the shell, but the shell has been optimized for the flex liner, so it’s not exactly the same shell, but it is the same tooling. So it looks similar, but it’s not identical. Then we did a refresh on the visor to kind of liven it up. But everything else is pretty much the same. Same chin bar, same cheek pads, but with new padding and all-new energy management.
Back in the day, you guys had some pretty iconic products. Stuff like the Moto-3 and Moto-4 really set the tone, and morphed into the Moto-5 some time around 1989. But then things disappeared after that with the whole European buy-out. Where would you say the new Flex ranks in terms of that spectrum?
Absolutely at the top. One of the myths I like the best is when people say helmet technology hasn’t changed and everyone’s using the same materials. Honestly EPS is the best energy management material for this use. If you want to try to apply that to football, it becomes impractical because there are multiple impacts. But EPS does a fantastic job. Using the three different materials we have with Flex, we’re able to get the slow energy, mid energy, and high energy. Our goal was to not give up on the high energy and to improve the lower energy impacts. So we started with about three meters per second. If you come to our lab and see what we do, when we tested it at three meters per second, you wouldn’t even think you’d ever hit your head like that, but the reality is you do. The tip-overs, the slow-energy impacts, even a big-energy impact, your body really absorbs a lot of the energy. What ends up in your head might be small. So you look at it—it looks underwhelming but we’re measuring that because it really is similar to what happens in a real crash. We’re really looking at that.
Just recently in motocross, there has been a conversation about safety stemming from tragic accidents that seem to come from head injuries. The way I understand it, your helmet and many others are approved by Snell and DOT, but that test only measures the high-speed stuff. You guys have also come up with a standard for lower speed and multiple impacts at once, which is great. But how does this conversation mesh with your new helmet? Are you familiar with some of these injuries, and have you collected data on these crashes?
It’s hard in a lab to replicate what happens on the human body in each crash, because every one is different. It’s tragic that these things happen. That’s why I work for the company; that’s what I’ve worked on for so long. We’re dedicated to saving lives and reducing injuries as best as we can. But then at the high end of the spectrum there’s a limit to how much a helmet could do. The unfortunate thing is there’s no helmet that’s going to protect everybody against everything. If we made this gigantic helmet, at some point it’s going to be a huge performance disadvantage and create its own injury mechanism, so with the amount of material that we can use, and just physics, we can’t protect everybody from those types of injuries. What we’re trying to do is just reduce everything—just really focus on reducing all energies. But since the standards are kind of more aligned towards the higher energy, and it’s going to change over time, we’re going to be focusing on bringing them all down. It’s easy to bring the low-speed down and give up at the high, but our challenge with this was keeping the high energies and bringing down the low energies. And we’ve met that as well.
Talk to me a little bit about the process that goes into the testing with R&D. Everybody says there’s no data or whatever.
Before we even tooled anything on this model we had developed a foundation to do internal prototyping with machining foam and different mock-ups. We tried a dozen different inner materials. We just kept trying and trying. I’m bumping the sizes up and down; I’m changing the thicknesses. We have a prototype shop in our Scotts Valley office that allows us to do that. We get to a point where we feel this is doing pretty good and then we go into tooling and we further refine it. Then we start talking about changing the shell, layups, and materials and the way the fibers orient and everything, and tuning it to that material. With what we have developed, we’re blown away by the results and feel very comfortable with what we’re moving forward with, and what big steps it made. And being the first one to do three different materials like that, I’ve never seen EPO in a helmet ever. I’ve seen EPP in some team-sport helmets, and EPS obviously, that’s doing most of the work in the whole energy management. But to get all three of these together and working in such harmony, it was a big deal for us. All three do contribute to the higher energy performance as well, because it’s slowing that impact down sooner. If you have a whole density of EPS you kind of shorten that impact cycle.
How many people are in the department with testing and R&D?
If you count our whole helmet team, which includes the Giro team, the Bell bike team, the Bell Powersports team, and you add Riddell into it, we’ve got 60–65 people dedicated 100 percent solely on helmets. In powersports we’ve got about eight people focused on R&D. And that’s just the designers and engineers. Each product creation team also consists of graphic designers that are doing the paint and the graphics on the outside, making the shape of the helmet look even better, and also designers who are doing the shape of the helmet. And then you have to work on all the ergonomics, padding, and making sure that everything works and has good touch in hand and feel, that kind of mechanical engineering. So they’re taking the industrial design intent and bringing it across the finish line with all the injection molding and tooling files to make it work in production.
Mike, thanks for chatting. I know there is a ton that goes into the development process and I hope your new helmet does what you guys think it will. More importantly, I hope you guys keep pushing the envelope and therefore keep improving safety.
Thanks for the chat, and yes, we will keep pushing things as much as possible.