Helmets have long been plagued by an unspoken rule: light weight, ventilation, aerodynamics, pick two - there's your helmet.
As you can tell by now though Specialized don't play by these rules, or really any for that matter. They'd rather turn standards on their head and create products that nobody ever dreamed of. And you needn't look any further than the new S-Works evade helmet for proof of this. Straight up it's the fastest road helmet out there.
Beginning with the aerodynamic development they basically lived in their WIN tunnel to create this Evade. Having their own wind tunnel allows them to develop their products with aero at the forefront of the design rather than merely testing them there. With this, they carefully analysed every aspect of helmet performance in the WIN tunnel and with real world testing, to ensure they left no stone unturned in the quest for performance. This makes for a helmet that has countless testing hours and years of development and ultimately this adds up to the fastest road helmet they've ever tested.
They not only took grams out of the drag but we did it without sacrificing safety. In FACT they switched the construction to favour the energy optimized multi-density EPS that optimizes the foam type in different places. As far as ventilation is concerned free-flowing air through the helmet not only makes the helmet cooler than ever but it also decreases aerodynamic drag. Going hand-in-hand with this, ventilation and aerodynamics were both optimized in the win tunnel, together making for the best combination of aerodynamics and ventilation out there. Now the exterior vents and interior channels have been carefully considered to make sure that the helmet draws in the maximum amount of air through the helmet for extreme cooling. And the result? The new Evade is just as cool as a bare head with no helmet, making it the coolest aero helmet on the market today.
Through this work the Evade saves 50 seconds over 40km versus a traditional road helmet and roughly six seconds over the prior iteration of Evade. This means that it's not only as cool as a bare head but also as fast. For road race helmets there's nothing that can match this performance.
Last but most certainly not least, a fast helmet is useless unless it fits correctly. With this in mind the new S-Works evade has all the features you'd expect from a top-level helmet, like the Mindset hairport 2 fit system, with micro- adjustments the soft webbing that won't stretch out, and a new gutter action brow pad that manages sweat to keep it out of your eyes. And to top it off they've added a new magnetic buckle to the mix that makes buckling with one hand a breeze.