With no info officially coming until just before Eurobike (read: mid-August), Bell let slip this image of a new road helmet being worn at the Tour de France by the LottoNL-Jumbo team. All they’ll say is that it’s going to sit at the high end of their range, is their most advanced helmet ever, and incorporates new technical features. We’ve blown out the image below to show what (might be) hiding in the shadows…
If we’re to go by the Team Lotto NL Jumbo facebook page, the new helmet might be called the Zephyr. To celebrate Dylan Groenenwegen’s Dutch national road title, a special version of the new helmet was shipped off to the Tour, though most of the time we’ve seen him in a similarly colored Bell Star Pro.
Most every good helmet these days is co-molded with the EPS foam and outer shell formed into single unit. Companies like Kali take it a step further by molding different density foams into specific places to create optimized crush zones and further slow impact forces. Here, it looks like Bell is building in multiple layers of EPS and possibly other types of padding (A) over top a MIPS liner (B). What’s particularly unique looking are the multiple layers of shell and padding (C) sandwiching each other. Click to enlarge the pic for better detail and let us know what you think in the comments…
