POC Sonal: The New Aero TT Helmet

In 2012 the Swedish Cycling Federation came to POC with a request. Gustav Larsson was going to the London Olympics, and they wanted the fastest time-trial helmet that could be made. Safe, without question. Quick enough to be worth a gold medal.

What’s remarkable about the request is that at that point we had not yet made any time trial helmets, or road bike helmets. But they came as they knew that simply building the same as everyone else was not the answer, instead it needed a new way of thinking, something that we were earning a reputation for. It required a process that would take the whole idea apart first, question every assumption, and if the answer turned out to be follow a whole new path, then so be it.

And that is what happened.

Until this point helmets were long, tapered shapes drawn to streamline the head on its own. The Tempor project started somewhere else. A rider moves through the air as a whole body, shoulders and back included, so the helmet had to be part of that profile. The Tempor looked like nothing else on the ramp in London and took many years to win over doubters, but eventually convention caught up with speed and today nearly every major team races a helmet built on that idea. Tellingly, the Tempor is still among the fastest.

Which is why we kept asking whether something could be even faster. So, as it turned out, did EF Pro Cycling.

“We have been working incredibly closely with EF for well over a decade and have built a great relationship,” says Magnus Gustavsson, our Director of Hard Goods. “It allows us to bring new ideas to the table, and everyone is eager to test them.”

Well over a decade of working together changes how a project starts. There is no need to pitch or create a polished brief that arrives beautifully packaged. Instead, there is a lot of open discussion, and even more trust. It’s what allows one of the EF Pro Cycling performance team to call when something they have seen in a race doesn’t add up, or POC calls the team when it has a new shape to test. The result is always the same. An eagerness to explore it, build it, and measure it.

That is what makes research so much easier. Not to mention enjoyable and dynamic. A hunch, or a half- formed idea, can go in front of the team without being tidied up first, just to test the hypothesis. A promising direction that turns out to be a dead end can be closed as quickly as it was opened and a new road found, because everyone in the tunnel wants the right answer.

When EF’s performance team asked whether it was possible to beat the Tempor, and in time for the next Tour de France, there was no run-up needed. As Andreas Klier, EF Pro Cycling Sports and Technical Director, put the brief plainly: aerodynamic gain was now needed by a far wider group of riders, not a handful of specialists.

From there the work went back and forth, and then back and forth again. CFD modelling showed how air moved around each version, with the Tempor, Cerebel and Procen as the benchmarks to beat. The wind tunnel turned simulation into numbers. Riders rode in their own positions, said what they felt, and sent shapes back to be changed. Then the loop ran again. And again.

Working with aerodynamic and wind tunnel experts, like Aerotak will provide insights into what a shape costs in watts, where are the weak spots, and what needs to change to help the air travel smoothly over the rider. And then the pro rider will add details, tipping their chin to see the road, or how the balance feels after forty minutes of maximum effort. That is a knowledge that can only belong to athletes who spend their working lives in a position most of us would find unbearable, and who excel in an environment most of us would consider alien.

All these details, discussions and iterations produced the central idea. If airflow over the whole body creates the profile, sizing a helmet by head circumference alone misses the point. The Sonal comes in two shell widths matched to shoulder width, but both share the same internal fit.

The elongated front deflects the high-pressure zone that builds ahead of a helmet and guides air over the rider instead. Against our own quick TT helmets at 60 km/h, it saves an average of 15 to 20 watts.

The Sonal is a big idea, but the aerodynamics is revealed in small details, found by asking question after question and trusting each other and the process.

In the end the speed is found. And it comes in many voices.