Product
When it comes to finding a street helmet, a lot of people will spring for the top-'o-the-line race helmet and call it a day. "If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me," they always say. And it's true-there's nothing inherently wrong with going that direction, but in the case of the Arai Corsair-V, its design and purpose was purely for the racetrack, where the high average speed creates a vacuum behind the helmet to pull hot air out. The channeling and direction of air flow also runs besides the temporal arteries, cooling the blood that goes to your head. A byproduct of all this airflow is noise. Noise that many customers complain about when it comes survey time.
In response, Arai has taken the lessons learned from the Corsair-V and gone to the drawing board to come up with something designed for the street: the Corsair RX-Q. Billed as the "Ultimate Street Helmet," the RX-Q is essentially the Corsair-V's little brother, if you will. As with the Corsair-V, the RX-Q comes in three shell sizes for the perfect fit, but is constructed using Arai's Super CLC process with a finer fiberglass resin. The result is a helmet that weighs slightly more than a Corsair-V, but is also less expensive to produce. Arai engineers figured that street riders weren't looking for the absolute lightest helmet possible like racers, so this different method was acceptable.
Speaking of shell shape, the RX-Q has an evolved version of the intermediate-oval interior shape, similar to the Corsair-V and Vector models, taken from constant measuring of American's heads. The same 10mm wider eyeport (five millimeters on each side) makes its way to the RX-Q as does Arai's trademark tool-less shield changing mechanism. While not intuitive to some, the side pods only take up millimeters of space, thus allowing the helmet to retain its natural "half-egg" shape, giving impact energy a path to flow and dissipate without interruption.
Inside the helmet, redesigned cheekpads are more formed and extend just slightly below the rider's jawbone, which Arai claims reduces noise significantly. An innovation first seen on the Corsair-V, the emergency cheek pad removal system also makes its way to the RX-Q. This helps emergency crews by allowing the cheek pads to be removed with a simple pull tab-thus reducing secondary injury to a fallen rider during removal of the helmet. Ten millimeter ventilation holes atop the helmet are the largest we know of in the industry and the accompanying scoops are now even more streamlined for stability not only in a straight line, but also as the rider turns their heads.
Overall, while the RX-Q is essentially the Corsair-V's little brother, it introduces a few new items all its own. Trying on samples our initial impressions are positive with a definite difference in coverage compared to the Corsair-V. But obviously we'll reserve full judgment until we actually ride with the helmet. Pricing is yet to be determined at press time, but expect it to be about $200 less than the current Corsair-V. The RX-Q should be available at the beginning of 2010. - T.S.