Review: Uvex Race 5 bike helmet
A top-end helmet let down by a couple of irritants
Straight from the head of Marcel Kittel to the bonce of the humble triathlete comes the Race 5 from Uvex, their top-of-the-line road lid used by the pros. However, while it certainly looks the part, when you put it on there are a couple of immediate worries.
Firstly, the front straps come down to the chin at a slightly wider angle than usual, leaving a noticable gap between the straps and your face, meaning that unless you have very wide sunglasses they have to go under the straps. Not the biggest problem in the world, but it does make the glasses harder to take off mid-ride. And, to be honest, with our usual riding eyewear, we couldn’t get fully comfortable with the glasses either over or under the straps.
The second is the padding. The front and back is fine, but the padding over the coronal suture and forehead is a little thin, resulting in a bit of discomfort during long rides. Potentially you could swap this out for padding from another helmet, but for £140 you really shouldn’t need to.
We’d suggest that Uvex consider putting a supplementary thicker set of padding in with the helmet (as do other brands) so you can change it if you need to. Having said that, if you have more hair than us, you might be fine.
Elsewhere, though, it performs very well. The ratchet is impressive and large enough so that adjusting it with gloves is easy, and the ratcheting buckle under the chin allows for an extra degree of adjustment over most other road helmets.
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