Introducing the brand new Fox Proframe full face helmet, ladies and gents.
The Fox Proframe goes on sale world wide today and is – in our opinion – a pretty interesting piece of kit.
We’ve got a helmet here at Wideopen HQ and we’re really pretty excited to get out and put some serious miles into it. It looks ideal for enduro racing and it looks equally ideal for those guys that pedal to the trails and then ride steep, gnarly, technical stuff.
Features:
- Varizorb protection
- MIPS protection
- Integrated chinbar – which meets ASTM standards
- 25 vents
- Fidlock bucklet
downhill protection, open face airflow
The Proframe is essentially a lightweight full face helmet with big, airy vents. Fox claim that they’ve created a helmet that offers “certified downhill level protection while maintaining nearly open face airflow”. The chin doesn’t detach like the Giro Switchblade (for example) but instead is designed to be light and vented enough that you can ride all day without needing to.
There’s a whopping 24 vents around the Proframe with seven of those on the chin piece, allowing load of air flow in and out. There’s also four big vents on the brow, a spot that anyone who’s ridden in the heat knows is a sweat zone on poorly vented lids. We’ve all got that mate who loves squeezing sweat out of their helmet, just to show off right?
The weight of Proframe is also really impressive, clocking in at just 735g. Fox’s full bore full-face, the Carbon Rampage Pro, is around 1300g which shows just how much lighter this is.
Safety first?
So, just how protective can a lightweight full face helmet be? Good question. We don’t have a lab handy to measure impacts and we haven’t crashed in the Proframe yet so we’re going to have to go on the safety standards.
The Fox meets the EN 1078:2012, ASTM F1952:2000, CPSC 1203 and AS/NZ 2063:208 safety standards. The reassuring one in the mix is ASTM F1952:2000 which is the current standard certification for helmets used for downhill helmets. Even more good-to-know is that the chin piece also meets the safety standards, not just the main shell of the helmet.
Alongside the standards, the helmet comes with MIPS to displace impacts and what Fox called ‘Varizorb’. Varizorb means that the helmet’s shell contains cone shaped, impact absorbing EPS foam which works alongside MIPS to spread impacts more widely. The Fox Metah helmet shares this technology.
Buy the Fox Proframe online here.
