With 28 years of helmet making under their belts, Met know a thing or two about bike helmets. And the brand from Talamona, a small town in the Italian Alps, chose Eurobike to unveil their latest TT helmet: the Drone.
Met have their own protocol to measure a helmet’s ventilation called the Air Scale. This measures two things: Head Contact Surface and Cooling Factor. Head Contact Surface is, as you might guess, how much of the helmet is in contact with how much of your head. The lower the score the better, because where the helmet and head are touching there’s no room for air to circulate and hence no room for ventilation.
Cooling factor is calculated using Fluid Flow Analysis. Met say that this uses a computerised system to ‘visualise and measure the motion of mass-less particles that are place in a flow field’. Which basically means that they measure the velocity and temperature of the air as it goes through the helmet, and rate it depending on its ability to keep the head cool. The higher the cooling factor is, the cooler your head will be. To put it in context, the Stradivarius HES, Met’s top-of-the-range road lid has a cooling factor of 9, whereas the Drone scored a 6. Not superb, but not too shabby, either.
In a medium, the Drone has a claimed weight of 350g which goes up a little bit to 400g if you have to opt for a large. We haven’t been given an RRP yet, but we’d have to suspect that it won’t be cheap, given that the Stradivarius comes in at £189.99. If you want to see one in action, they’re currently being ridden by the MTN Qhubeka team.
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