Smith

Overtake Helmet

In 2013, Smith unveiled its first ever foray into the cycling helmet industry, the mountain bike-specific Forefront, to rave reviews. Now, it's upped the ante with the Overtake Helmet, designed specifically for the road. Situated firmly in the race-ready helmet domain, the Overtake is light weight and feature features welcome design elements such as sunglass channels to stow your shades just above the temples for coffee shop raids or slow, sweaty climbs, and some structural differences that make the Overtake really stand out.

That funny looking layer of honeycomb matter that runs beneath the outer shell and more traditional EPS foam is what Smith calls Koroyd. It's made of thousands of tiny, extruded co-polymer tubes that absorb impact but have a fenestrated surface that allows for a level of breathability impossible to achieve with solid EPS foam while absorbing a claimed 30% more energy. Plus, it's pretty cool looking, especially in Smith's mix of contrasting and complementary color schemes.

With aerodynamics becoming the preeminent buzz word in cycling helmets of late, Smith knew that the Overtake had to stack up against the industry's best in this department, so it brought in Len Brownlie, an aerodynamics guru whose CV includes helping Commonwealth Games champion Tara Whitten dial her time trial position, contributing to Canada's OwnthePodium project, and presenting a paper titled "The wind-averaged aerodynamic drag of competitive time trial cycling helmets" at the 2010 conference of the International Sports Engineering Association in Vienna. Brownlie adapted an automobile industry test for cycling-specific applications, and the Overtake was tossed into the wind tunnel for a test.

Apparently the Overtake studied, because it passed. At a simulated 25 miles per hour over 40 kilometers, the Overtake surrendered a mere 1.06 seconds of advantage to the Specialized Evade and actually gained 4.15 and 26.8 seconds over Giro's Air Attack and Aeon, respectively.