Ever since since the very public failure of the Skully AR-1 project and the subsequent revelation of the company founders' misuse of capital obtained from crowdfunding, I've been very wary of Kickstarter and similar projects, whether bike-related or not. While the guys behind these projects might make you starry-eyed with promises of an all-singing, all-dancing product, chances for many of these products actually making it to the production stage are usually at the "slim to none" end of the probability scale.
Which is why, when the crowdfunding drive for the Atlas helmet project from Ruroc came to my attention, I greeted it with my habitual scepticism. Yes, sure, the helmet looks the dog's whatsits, and the glowing product description made me think "hmm, not bad", but at the same time I reckoned that this was yet another bit of bike gear that would never actually make it to the shops. After a bit of ferreting around on the internet I discovered that the Ruroc company already markets a helmet designed for snowboarding, freestyle skiing and downhill mountain-biking - all of which are sports that I'm not really very clued up on. And if I had paid more attention, I would have recognised their "extreme sport" lid as the one used by the works Suzuki Ecstar MotoGP™ team for its pit crew.
