The partial image above is POC Sports’ first foray into road bike helmets. It’s called Tempor, and it’s a TT aero helmet that’ll debut during the men’s and women’s time trials at the London 2012 Olympics.
Swedish women’s cyclists Emma Johansson and Emilia Fahlin were spotted wearing it just before the event (pic after the break), and Wednesday will see them and Beijing Silver Medalist Gustav Larson wearing it during competition. Details should come just after the event, but POC’s staff told us safety was every bit as important as aerodynamics.
UPDATE: The product is now live on POC’s website here, additional details & photos added below!
The shape is absolutely unique among recent introductions from other big players and was reportedly designed to maximize slipperiness in the riding position.
Click image to enlarge for detail.
Women’s TT starts at 12:30 London time Wednesday, men’s follows. More info and images as we get them.
PRESS RELEASE: As a first step towards the Road Bike scene, POC has developed the Tempor Time Trial helmet together with POC Lab and aerodynamic specialists at Semcon. The Road Bike products are planned to evolve into one of the most important product categories for POC.
With POC´s mission of “doing the best we can to possibly save lives and to reduce the consequences of accidents for gravity sport athletes”, and in this case without compromising aerodynamics, the challenge was clear. The Tempor helmet is developed to promote maximum performance and aerodynamics, without sacrificing safety properties.
POC´s new conceptual approach to optimize aerodynamics and speed was to view the rider as one body mass, rather than isolating the head from the rest of the body. Simultaneously with this new approach, energy absorbing material has been added where most needed to increase the rider´s safety.
By involving aerodynamic specialists from Semcon, POC has been tweaking and fine-tuning. With field testing and extensive simulations including advanced aerodynamics and kinetics, the shape has been refined and ultimately adapted to integrate perfectly with the professional bike racer´s position on the bike. In the quest for optimization, the simulations done, counts to more than 60 billion single projections. The amount of data processing and nodes used corresponds to about 20% of what’s used in the most sophisticated aerodynamic projections for Formula-1 cars. And this is just a single helmet, compared to a whole car. The result is amazing with superior performance, both when it comes to safety and speed. How much better? We thought we´d let people guess before officially announcing it.
“We are extremely excited, enthusiastic and humble moving in to the Road Bike Scene. It´s a category that we deliberately put on hold until we had the time and capacity. Both this first Time Trial helmet Tempor, as well as other products in process to come, are projects where we have been able to invest more in than ever before.” says Stefan Ytterborn, Founder and CEO POC.
Thanks to Johan for the tip!
