AFT Racer Walks Away From Horrific Dirt-Track Crash

In the realm of motorsports, motorcycle racers are exposed to a high degree of danger unlike any other. With no metal cage to protect them, if they lose control, they often find themselves ejected from the saddle of their machine, their bodies at the mercy of Newton’s laws of motion as they are usually flung hard onto an unforgiving racing surface.

Making matters worse is when someone crashes in the middle of a close pack of racers fighting for position. Never mind being thrown like a rag doll onto the racetrack; the prone rider now has the high probability of being hit by one of the following motorcycles traveling at a high rate of speed. At that point, the only thing standing between a helpless racer lying on the track and a possible devastating impact with said motorcycles is the rider’s protective gear.

Former American Flat Track series racer Johnny Lewis (now retired and managing Royal Enfield’s AFT race team) was competing in the Supertwins class of the AFT Ventura National Short Track event in May of last year when he suffered a nasty crash and found himself in the aforementioned scenario.

“It was the second lap of the main event and I had just passed a couple of guys around the outside for fifth or sixth when the front tire hit a bump in the track and skipped a little bit,” Lewis recalls. “When the front came back down, it caused the bike to head towards the wall. I ended up bouncing off the wall and the suspension unloaded and I fell off.”

As Lewis slid down the front straight feetfirst, the following pack of a dozen or so riders hurtling toward him at better than 80 mph had to take avoiding action. If you watch the slo-mo portion of the video, you can see several riders did an absolutely amazing job of not hitting him, despite having to steer their bikes away with mere feet to spare and brushing past him with their boots.

Unfortunately, racer Morgen Mischler couldn’t avoid hitting Lewis’ bike, and as Mischler’s Honda Transalp-based machine caromed off of Lewis’ spinning Royal Enfield, the Honda’s fork smashed into Lewis’ helmet before cartwheeling off the track. The horrifying-looking incident quickly caused a red flag to stop the race.

Incredibly both riders were eventually able to walk away from the incident, with Lewis in particular suffering no major injuries and no loss of consciousness. “I didn’t get knocked out, I was awake the whole time,” Lewis says, adding, “Nothing really hurt at that moment, and I didn’t have any headaches or anything like that afterward. Later on, my neck muscles started twitching and having spasms for a little while, but nothing serious.”

A close examination of Lewis’ Arai Corsair-X helmet shows that it received a major impact by an object (likely the bottom of the fork leg on Mischler’s bike) in the upper right forehead area. The hit was serious enough to fracture the top layer of fiberglass in the outer shell of the helmet, but there was no other visible damage to the shell according to Arai. The polycarbonate face shield also sustained an impact that was hard enough to fracture it, something you don’t see very often with the very strong and durable plastic. That Lewis was able to walk away from a hit like that without suffering any major head injury is a testament to the helmet’s protective qualities.

Helmet protection technology has made some strides lately, and Arai is one of those companies that is constantly looking to innovate. Interestingly, unlike many other helmet manufacturers, Arai is still “old school” in that all of its helmet shells are still laid by hand by experienced craftsmen. This allows Arai’s shells to utilize more than 20 separate pieces that must be precisely laid into the mold, in addition to proprietary fibers, mats, and resins that provide increased strength with less thickness and weight than other helmets. All of Arai’s helmet shells adhere to the “R75″ design concept, where the shell incorporates a continuous curve radius of at least 75mm for a round and smooth shape that Arai claims helps the helmet to “glance off” an impact and mitigate rotational forces on the brain that are the main cause of concussions. Arai also uses up to four different densities of EPS foam (out of 10 different densities) in the one-piece inner liner, enabling the impact energy absorption to be fine-tuned for different areas of the helmet.

Obviously, no helmet can protect you from any foreseeable impact. But it’s certainly nice to see a helmet do its job in allowing the rider to walk away from what could have been a very serious incident.