Road Racer X Magazine: Bell's Back

This article reprinted Verbatim with permission from the March/April 2008 issue of Road Racer X.

Bell’s Back

For longtime fans of motorsports, the Bell brand has epitomized high-end helmets-after all, the all-American company basically invented motorsports helmets, as well as such technological breakthroughs as the full-face design. Eventually, however, some bad splits and mergers led to a troubled phase that essentially cheapened the name. Happily, Bell Powersports is back in the game, under the corporate umbrella of Easton-Bell Sports but functioning day-to-day like a small company, out of a shop in Santa Cruz, California.

Bell knows that its current iteration will be judged in part based on the new Star- which shares the name of that original full-face model from forty years ago. According to Vice President Tom Larter, the Star’s creators tapped other areas of the company’s expertise.

“We wanted a helmet that was more stable that anything else out there, so we went to our auto racing guys who design open-cockpit F1 and IndyCar helmets,” he said. “We wanted a helmet that had incredible air circulation, so we tapped the designers who do our super-ventilated Tour de France bicycle helmets and Moto-8 supercross helmet. We wanted the best shield mechanism with the fasted shield swaps, so we assigned a team that specializes in the small parts and mechanisms found on our snow helmets to focus on that.”


The Star also features graphics by ’98 AMA 250cc GP champ Roland Sand, who wore Bell throughout his career. This season, you’ll see it on the head of Rockwall Honda’s Aaron Gobert.