Helmets used to just be something you wore, an extension of your kit. You find one that fits, has a lot of vents, is reasonably priced, in a color you like, looks good on you, and off you go.
Well, in the last couple of years, road helmets have come out that can be aerodynamic performance tools. In fact, the best of these so-called aero road helmets can save you nearly as much time as a set of aero wheels or an aero frame, and do so for a lot less money. Picking between them is more like choosing the right gear and less like buying a new kit.
No, I’m not talking about those funny looking, over-sized, no vent, pointy things that track cyclists and time trialists wear. I’m actually talking about helmets made for road cycling enthusiasts like you and me, most that look and work pretty much like regular road helmets do, but are designed with improved aerodynamics to help you go a lot faster for the same amount of effort.
What’s the difference between an aero road helmet and a standard road helmet? First, you can spend up to $100/£70/€90/AU$120 more than the top road enthusiast level helmet made by the same company. Most, however, are less than $35 more. You can also cut 30 to 60 seconds off your time over a 25mile/40km course and minutes off a century, Gran Fondo or sportive length ride. Alternatively, if you go the same speed you will need 10 to 15 less watts of effort, or about 5% less work to do it. (I much prefer to ride faster!)
The best new aero road helmets fit and cool you as well as standard road helmets, are equally safe and while they are generally bigger and rounder, most are shaped more like your regular road helmet than the long pointy ones the speed demons who grip aero bars for miles prefer to wear.
Interested? I was too when they first started coming on the market. But, as I looked around, it seemed every company had recently introduced a new aero road helmet and most of the articles about them were regurgitated feature descriptions and performance claims rather than critical and comparative reviews that could help me decide whether I should get one and which one I should get.
So, I went to a combination of the online stores I recommend with low prices and great service and to a few local bike shops I like and bought 7 of the latest model aero road helmets, wore and compared them to each other and to my standard road helmet during my riding this past summer and early fall, and put together this review based on what I found.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
If you need a new helmet or want to trade up to a helmet that will help you ride faster, you should buy an aero road helmet. Short of shaving your legs or buying tires with lower rolling resistance, an aero road helmet is one of the least costly pieces of gear you can buy to ride significantly faster. (See this link for my post on gear and kit that can help you ride faster). Other than the added cost or a personal preference against of the look of some of these helmets, I don’t see any drawbacks to wearing one and a lot of advantages.
I don’t however, recommend every aero road helmet and think some of the ones I’ve tested are clearly better than others. After comparing the 7 aero road helmets I bought and my own regular one against four groups of criteria over a couple of months of riding in various situations, I recommend the Kask Protone, in stock at the best prices from stores with top customer satisfaction ratings in the US and Canada at Competitive Cyclist and in the UK and EU at Tweeks Cycles, Tredz and the Specialized S-Works Evade on Specialized S-Works Evade in the UK/EU Tredz, Cyclestore and through Specialized dealers elsewhere.
The Louis Garneau Course (Competitive Cyclist, Amazon, Evans Cycles) and Bontrager Ballista (Trek Bicycle Superstore) performed on par on most criteria but didn’t fit me well. They might fit you better and are worth consideration.
Finally, I’d steer clear of the Bell Star Pro, Giro Synthe and Giant Rivet for reasons I’ll say more about below.
This chart summarizes the reviews that follow
WHY TRUST THIS SITE AND MY RECOMMENDATIONS
In The Know Cycling is for road cycling enthusiasts like you and me who want to know what gear we should get next and where we can get it at the best prices from great stores. I do hours of my own testing and analysis on an entire category of cycling gear for each review and incorporate insights from other independent reviewers and riders I respect. I respond to most any question you have in the comment section of each post, usually within a few hours if I’m not on a long ride or sleeping (Eastern US time).
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Contents – The Best Aero Road Helmets
Keep reading or click on any of these links to go directly to another section of this review
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WHERE TO BUY YOUR HELMET
As with any cycling product these days, an important question is whether to buy it at an online or physical store. With helmets it kind of depends on whether you live near a well stocked store or not. If you do, you can try on helmets at your local shop. Helmet prices were only slightly better (10-15%) sold at online stores and in some cases they were essentially the same. So, if you find something you really like locally, you won’t be paying much extra to buy it at the shop.
That said, most bike shops carry only selected brands and within those, selected colors and sizes. Most of the sizing charts are the same so, for example, if you are a medium in one helmet you are very likely to be a medium in another. And the 30 seconds you are wearing the helmet you are considering in the store with the salesman telling you how good you look and you feeling a bit awkward walking around with a helmet on and peeking into a small mirror on a sunglasses rack may not be the best way to decide on a new helmet.
For this review, I looked at all of the helmets I bought at one of several bike stores near me. I ended up buying the Specialized, Giant and Bontrager aero road helmets at bike shops and bought the Bell, Giro, Kask and Garneau online.
I found the online experience far superior. I looked up the helmets in the size and color I wanted and for the best price without getting out of my chair, entered in my card information and got them delivered to my door in a couple of days. I wore each of them around the house for a while adjusting the fit before ever going out on my bike, got some feedback on how they looked from the people in my life who offer the most honest opinions (my oh-so-hip kids) and spent as much time admiring or hating each helmet on me as I wanted. Both online stores I ordered from were ready to give me a return label if I wanted to send one or more of the helmets back for any reason.
Conversely, I made multiple calls to multiple local bike shops to find the helmets I was looking for, had to special order a few, and made multiple trips to the stores I ended up buying them at. I’m already a committed online shopper; I look at this experience chasing helmets around at local bike shops as another case of lost riding time.
Now that I’m done with this review, I’m keeping one helmet and selling four on eBay. I returned a helmet that was defective and another was so uncomfortably hot and loud that I took it back to the store.
Now that I’m done with this review, I’m keeping one helmet and selling four on eBay. I returned a helmet that was defective and another was so uncomfortably hot and loud that I took it back to the store.
CANDIDATES
For this review, I evaluated seven aero road helmets. In alphabetical order, they are the Bell Star Pro, Bontrager Ballista, Giant Rivet, Giro Synthe, Kask Protone, Louis Garneau Course, and Specialized Evade. They retail from approximately $160/£115/€145/AU$200 to $300/£210/€270/AU$360.
As a standard helmet comparison, I also used my two-year old Lazer Genesis model the company still sells for $175/£125/€160/AU$120 retail. It’s somewhere in the middle of their road helmet product line with a couple of models more expensive (up to $210) and a few less expensive.
Here’s how the seven aero road helmet candidates and my standard one look lined up against each other. More photos at different angles are included with the review of each helmet below.
I didn’t evaluate any of the aero road helmets that are essentially standard road helmets that come with clip-on tops to cover the vents. These include the POC Octal Aero, Scott Vanish Aero, MET Rivale and Lazer Z1 Fast. The ‘put a lid on it’ design of these helmets doesn’t seem very practical to me for most road cycling enthusiasts and suggests an absolute minimum amount of engineering to produce a road helmet that is more aero. I’ve also got to believe these helmets would be pretty uncomfortable on a warm summer day. I expect some these companies will eventually offer a true aero road helmet.
CRITERIA
As with all In The Know Cycling reviews, I consider four groups of criteria – performance, design, quality and cost. Within your chosen budget, I believe the performance of a product is paramount. Design can lead to good performance (or not) but all too often companies market their design (and cycling media write too much about it) as the basis of product evaluation. So you get an overemphasis, for example, on weight or product feature differences that matter little to the actual performance of products and a lack of comparison of performance differences like stiffness or aerodynamics that are often harder to measure, quantify and market but that should be what you use to decide what to get.
For aero road helmets, these are the criteria within each group that my research suggests are most important:
Performance: Safety, Fit, Aerodynamics, Cooling, Noise
All bike helmets should have a safety compliance sticker showing they meet a credentialed safety standard. Helmets sold in the US must meet the CPSC (Consumer Products Safety Commission) standard. All the helmets I evaluated for this review do. Other countries or regions also have groups that set safety standards for helmets including Australia and New Zealand (AS/NZS), Great Britain (BSI), Canada (CSA), Europe (CE), Japan (JIS) and Sweden. Helmets must meet these standards or stores generally won’t carry them.
Consumer Reports, a highly regarded US independent consumer testing publication, ran tests of 23 helmets this year (summary here) including those from all the major brands (though none of the aero helmet models I reviewed). Some performed slightly better than others in their impact tests but all the helmets passed Consumer Reports’ own safety tests, which appear to me to be tougher than the CSPC ones. Note, there was no correlation between the helmet’s price and impact performance level.
Helmets with a MIPS system (Multi-directional Impact Protection System) are being sold by a growing number of companies now with the largest helmet manufacturer, Bell, the owner and leading proponent. The concept is to have a layer of the polystyrene material used in most helmets that will rotate a few millimeters with your head while the harder outer shell poly-carbonate or carbon fiber material stays with your helmet to reduce the effect of impact.
It’s not been independently shown that helmets using MIPS design (or Smith’s collapsible plastic or other systems) improves impact performance. Very few of the aero road helmets have MIPS systems and none that I evaluated did. Fortunately, I didn’t fall while riding any of these helmets, therefore avoiding the chance to personally test their impact performance.
Generally speaking, round and slick surface helmets that slide easily on pavement are said to offer the best solution to reducing impact. Aero road helmets are amongst the roundest and slickest helmets available, though again no independent tests show they are any better in reducing impact than standard ones. More discussion on this can be found here.
For the purpose of this review, I can’t separate the helmets based on their safety performance and I don’t see a reason to spend more on one helmet that meets the standard using a certain type of protection system vs. another less costly one that also meets the standard using a different type of protection system.
Fit is altogether different. Heads are like snowflakes – no two are the same – and some helmets will fit yours better than others. The same helmet that fits me well may not fit you and vice versa. A good fitting helmet leads to a comfortable ride, absolutely key when you are getting out with the kind of frequency and distance that we enthusiasts put in.
Fit is also a critical prerequisite to helmet safety. If a helmet doesn’t fit you well, all the helmet safety stickers and protection systems aren’t going to help you much. As an enthusiast, you probably have a good sense of what to do to make your helmet fit comfortably. However, fitting comfortably and safely aren’t always the same things. Since you are reading this, I feel compelled to share with you this short video on how Consumer Reports does their impact testing and how they recommend you make sure your helmet fits safely. Please watch it.
Thanks. I feel better now.
While the ways a helmet can be made to fit is a design matter that varies somewhat between companies, a comfortable and safe fit is clearly a performance matter. I can’t speak to how my fit experience will translate to yours; I can only tell you which helmets fit me best and which, based on their design, should be able to do the same for you.
The aerodynamic differences between various aero road helmets take us into the hard-to-tell realm. Companies mostly quote the relative performance rankings of tests they’ve run between their aero road and best standard road helmets. While they’ve undoubtedly run tests against competitors’ helmets, few share the results in detail (or at all) though some claim superiority. For example, Specialized says it Evade is faster than Giro’s Synthe and Giro says the opposite. Louis Garneau says its Course is faster than both of them. Etc.
Bike Radar published comparative wind tunnel tests they commissioned of aero road helmets. While the magazine often does great work, this wasn’t one of their finer moments. Unfortunately, their tests were too limited to be anything but misleading, likely due to the short amount of time they could afford paying (or were given free) for wind tunnel testing.
This is not my view – it is my unvarnished reading of the comments published at the end of the Bike Radar article by the founder and technology director of the Faster wind tunnel that carried out the tests for Bike Radar, a second set of points made by the director of helmet development at Giro also published as part of the article, and finally these comments by Lennard Zinn, the very well-regarded and long time technical editor of VeloNews who responded to a question about these tests in his column.
Tour Magazine (available only by subscription), an independent cycling gear testing magazine with a laboratory and analytical approach, tested a baker’s dozen worth of helmets for their May 2014 issue including standard road, aero road and TT helmets. While many of the aero road helmets in my evaluation have been introduced since Tour did its testing, their analysis showed that aero road helmets had significantly superior aero performance to standard road helmets and nearly as good as TT ones.
So while I can’t tell the relative aerodynamic merits of different aero road helmets, I’m confident they, as a group, are faster than the best regular road helmets. While this is in part based on Tour’s testing and numerous company tests like these here and here (something I am loath to endorse), the superior performance of aero road helmets over the best standard road models reported by all the manufacturers tells me there is something real there.
More importantly, numerous independently conducted tests (here, here, here, here, here) have been conducted over the years and show in a comprehensive, scientifically credentialed way (i.e, lots of equations) the quantitative aero benefits of TT helmets.
From reading through all of these various tests, I’ve concluded that aero road helmets are more aero/faster than standard road helmets that most cycling enthusiasts wear by about 10-15 watts or 30-60 seconds over a 25mile/40km distance.
As with all things aero, results will vary based on rider shape and position, wind direction, environmental factors, testing protocols and other variables. While it’s quantifiably clear that aero road helmets as a group are faster than standard road helmets, an attempt to undeniably distinguish which aero road helmet is faster or a claim by one company that theirs is faster than their competition is pure folly.
I did do comparative testing of other performance factors of the seven aero road helmets against each other and against my own standard road helmet. (Hopefully not folly.) I’ll describe this in a moment. What I did notice is that I was able to ride substantially faster with all the aero road helmets than with my standard helmet on a stretch of road I picked out for this evaluation. None of the aero road helmets were that much faster or slower than another however, even with my totally non-scientific test, to be able to rank order them.
It became clear to me that some of the helmets felt more aero than others based on the way the air seemed to flow and sound going around and through my helmet. While this comparison of “aero-feel” is totally subjective, as with many things cycling related, how you feel on your bike can affect how you perform. So if you feel like you are going faster, even though you might not be, you may put out a little extra effort to actually make you go faster. This is both the folly and reality of design and marketing.
Since most of us cycling enthusiasts ride during several hot months of the year and our heads heat up even in the cooler ones, the helmet’s cooling ability is an important performance criterion. Fortunately, at least for testing purposes, I’m one of those people who heats up pretty quickly and can overheat if not careful.
So while I measured each helmet’s cooling performance anecdotally versus scientifically (no, I wasn’t wearing a thermometer under my lid), if one helmet didn’t cool well relative to another including my standard multi-vent non aero road helmet, I was going to notice.
Finally, I attempted to judge the relative noise of each aero helmet. I tried to determine if the shape of the helmet and the way the air passed through it and by my ears was annoying or made it more difficult to hear the road noise or have a discussion on a group ride.
https://intheknowcycling.com/2015/09/27/best-aero-road-helmets/
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