I had heard a lot of good things about the Schuberth C3 and having ridden 600 miles in a day with the very noisy Carberg I decided to try out a Schuberth. I popped into Helmet City’s shop cum farm, where the guys let me put my soaking wet gloves on the heater. I tried out a range of helmets, but was advised by them not to buy a seriously reduced in price C2 as it had been on about 3,000 heads at shows and I tried it on and it did smell a bit! I bought a C3 flip up lid in matt black. The price was discounted but it is not a cheap lid.
However I wanted a number of features, the first was the drop down dark visor, secondly I wanted quiet, thirdly I wanted a helmet which was designed not to come off in crash. As a solicitor who spends all day dealing with serious motorcycle accidents I am all too well aware that just about any helmet will come off just about any head if the rider is unlucky. The Schuberth has two key features which resist this. The first is the chin piece sits snug to the chin and secondly the strap sits close to the throat. Having seen loads of expert reports as to why helmets come off, these Shuberths are said to be designed to avoid this particular problem. However, all lids have their engineering constraints, so no helmet manufacturer will ever be able to persuade me that their lids will stay on in every situation.
On riding for the first time in the Shuberth, it was a bit but not massively quieter than my Shoei Raid II. It was comfortable, quite snug and the noise reduction was most noticeable when listening to my sat nav and mobile phone. If you don’t have your lid wired full of gizmos and ride in earplugs the quietness really is not a big factor.
It was really easy to fit the Autocom head set neatly into the lid, with a little nick cut into the polystyrene lining to accommodate the shrink/heat wrapped connector for the autocom.
So would I recommend it? Yes, it is quiet, comfortable, the inner visor is excellent but it has one really annoyng habit. The main visor flops down at about 25mph. In urban riding in the summer I lift the whole front up, which looks a bit stupid, probably isn’t especially safe and has the potential to mess up my already fairly lived in face. If the weather is really hot, I use the Shoei, which for a supposedly top of the range Schuberth is a little poor.