Suomy Gun Wind helmet
Suomy's Gun Wind helmet has polarizing looks, but if you dig the European flair, this lid might be just right.
230
$225
Suomy
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It might be futile to review Suomy’s Gun Wind helmet. There’s a good chance you already made up your mind on the wildly polarizing aesthetics. Maybe you love that exotic, weird Euro look. Or perhaps you loathe anything beyond the staid, smooth aesthetics of Giro, Bell, or Specialized lids. Regardless, the Gun Wind has very good ventilation and it is quite comfortable, even if it makes your straight-laced riding buddies embarrassed to ride by your side.
With vents that look a little like a car radiator, the Gun Wind is quite cool, even on slow, sunny climbs. Suomy designed the helmet to maintain a slight gap around most of the head to promote airflow. That, combined with the 25 vents, was pretty effective.
Unfortunately, despite all of those vents, we could never find the perfect holes for our sunglasses to rest. Don’t sweat this detail if you never take off your shades. If you’re fighting a summer-long battle to keep the sweat off your shades, however, it is a bit annoying when a helmet doesn’t easily house your glasses.
In that vein, the Gun Wind has a very large and absorbent forehead pad. This helped keep sweat from dripping into our face on all but the most sweltering days.
The helmet has a nice round fit that sits securely around the head, not on top of it like some minimalist race helmets. The rear retention system has a conventional dial to snug things up. There are five vertical and two horizontal settings to position the retention. Unfortunately, those changes rely on the old-school snap-in fixings, which aren’t as quick to adjust or durable, we’ve found.
Suomy’s straps and buckles are slightly heavier than helmets like Specialized’s Prevail 2 or the Kask Protone. Fortunately, that wasn’t noticeable while riding and certainly didn’t detract from the Gun Wind’s impressively light weight of 230 grams.
When it comes to performance, the Gun Wind holds its own as a high-end road helmet. If you’re still reading by this point, the aesthetics must not have repelled you, so if Suomy’s shape fits your head, it might be a fine way to add some European flair to your life.