Sorry for taking a while to reply, I was blissfully unplugged for the better part of the past week. Okay, MIPS, the sacred cow...
My main beef is that I feel that MIPS has, up until very recently, come at the expense of comfort and fit and mass without providing what I personally consider to be tangible benefits with regard to concussive trauma impact mitigation. At the same time, it has been sold as a "must have" feature for anyone serious about crashing, and has carried a price increase with it when compared across the board to the same helmet in a non-MIPS configuration.
The fit issues have been pretty well outlined by others in this thread - more bulk, wobble-rattle, sometimes hair-pully, sometimes bald-head-scratchy. And yes, newer versions have improved hugely in all these regards. That is reassuring, but there is still some amount of wobble or yaw to contend with on even the best MIPS lids, and there is still the fact that the extra parts and manufacturing required tend to make a given helmet cost more.
As for the tangible benefits, those have also been well articulated by others here. Rotational impact concussive trauma is absolutely a thing, and absolutely can be tested for. However, the massive variety of head shapes, hair thickness (isn't hair itself a kind of slip plane, of we are going to split hairs, so to speak, about what actually constitutes a functional shear layer?), skull thickness, brain soup viscocity, area between skull and brain differentials, all this makes it really difficult to consistently deliver something that will measurably and definitively reduce the likelihood of rotational concussion for YOU specifically by X percent.
When I was a wee lad growing up in my dad's motorcycle helmet test lab, testing was primitive. We dropped weights onto helmets with headforms inside them that had strain gauges to measure the impact forces. Top of lid, forehead, sides, and in the case of full-face helmets a frontal chin-bar crush test. There was a weight with a spike that measured shell penetration, and another set of weights that were basically convex. The impacts that these helmets were required to survive (with regard to both AS/NZ testing or DOT/USA testing) were catastrophic. Sort of like running into a guard rail with your head at 100mph. This was the 1980s, and concussive trauma just did not exist in medical knowledge at that time. The impacts that people tested for back then were the kind of things that even if you did survive without head injury, it was highly likely that the rest of your body would be turned to paste anyway. But hey, at least you wouldn't have died from head trauma.
Jan. 5, 2022, 1:39 p.m. - Mike Ferrentino
Sorry for taking a while to reply, I was blissfully unplugged for the better part of the past week. Okay, MIPS, the sacred cow... My main beef is that I feel that MIPS has, up until very recently, come at the expense of comfort and fit and mass without providing what I personally consider to be tangible benefits with regard to concussive trauma impact mitigation. At the same time, it has been sold as a "must have" feature for anyone serious about crashing, and has carried a price increase with it when compared across the board to the same helmet in a non-MIPS configuration. The fit issues have been pretty well outlined by others in this thread - more bulk, wobble-rattle, sometimes hair-pully, sometimes bald-head-scratchy. And yes, newer versions have improved hugely in all these regards. That is reassuring, but there is still some amount of wobble or yaw to contend with on even the best MIPS lids, and there is still the fact that the extra parts and manufacturing required tend to make a given helmet cost more. As for the tangible benefits, those have also been well articulated by others here. Rotational impact concussive trauma is absolutely a thing, and absolutely can be tested for. However, the massive variety of head shapes, hair thickness (isn't hair itself a kind of slip plane, of we are going to split hairs, so to speak, about what actually constitutes a functional shear layer?), skull thickness, brain soup viscocity, area between skull and brain differentials, all this makes it really difficult to consistently deliver something that will measurably and definitively reduce the likelihood of rotational concussion for YOU specifically by X percent. When I was a wee lad growing up in my dad's motorcycle helmet test lab, testing was primitive. We dropped weights onto helmets with headforms inside them that had strain gauges to measure the impact forces. Top of lid, forehead, sides, and in the case of full-face helmets a frontal chin-bar crush test. There was a weight with a spike that measured shell penetration, and another set of weights that were basically convex. The impacts that these helmets were required to survive (with regard to both AS/NZ testing or DOT/USA testing) were catastrophic. Sort of like running into a guard rail with your head at 100mph. This was the 1980s, and concussive trauma just did not exist in medical knowledge at that time. The impacts that people tested for back then were the kind of things that even if you did survive without head injury, it was highly likely that the rest of your body would be turned to paste anyway. But hey, at least you wouldn't have died from head trauma.