Review: Met Parabellum Helmet

Published: 21st January 2014 | By AngusMcIntosh

A few months back Met announced a new trail helmet to enter the fold with backing from the likes of team riders, Hannah Barnes, Alex Lupato and Steffi Marth.

We really liked what we had to see and couldn’t wait to get our hands on the kit and give it the full MoreDirt review treatment.

The Parabellum is a very top end product with all the bells and whistles that you could ever expect to see from a mountain bike trail helmet and probably a few more that you may not of ever thought of but it does come at a fairly heavy price.

First Impressions

There are 2 overwhelming features that hit you about the Parabellum on removal from the box. The incredibly low weight of the helmet and the shear amount of vents!

Unsurprisingly both go hand in hand. Naturally as you remove more material from the helmet to create more vents, the overall weight goes down but the Parabellum in a medium size comes in at 270g which for a trail helmet that offers such a high level of protection along with a whole host of other features is really very impressive.

Technical details

On paper the Parabellum stacks up there with the best of them. It’s got great rear coverage and a big front visor to aid protection and keep the sun from your eyes. The visor attachment and range of movement at it’s disposal was obviously something that was taken into account at the design stage. When the peak is raised to the highest position there’s enough space to keep a pair of goggles up top and out of the way underneath the peak.

The ability to use a mountable action camera to a helmet in a neat and tidy package is almost becoming a necessity with the likes of Bell and Kali providing some quality camera mounting options last year. The Parabellum features MOPOV technology, standing for “my own point of view”. This means a neat and tidy mount for all the major brands of cameras can be added to the helmet and then removed when no longer necessary leaving no unsightly mounts stuck to the top your precious new lid!

To increase levels of comfort the Parabellum has a well thought out single hand operated retention system at the rear that can not only adjust the size of the helmet it can also adjust how high or low the helmet sits on the head. The front gel 02 anti allergenic front pad is not also a step up in terms of cleanliness with the pad no longer absorbing sweat to harbor germs, the gel pad disperses sweat to the side of the face keeping the rider cool.

Construction

The construction of the helmet is also a bit of a talking point with Met opting to go down the in-mold fusion line along with an increasing number of manufactures thanks to it’s increased impact dispersion. Met have also elected to up the game one step further however with a “Homothetic Embedded Skeleton”.

In simple terms… In the event of a crash, 99 times out of 100 all the impact load is going to be focused on one point. The integration of a homothetic skeleton at the back of the helmet spreads the impact force over the entire shell reducing how much is transferred to the skull and consequently the brain which can cause the serious injuries.

I know what your thinking… The introduction of these 2 features with incredibly long and complex names has just been dreamt up to elongate the list of features and talking points here and justify the price… That’s where you would be wrong. These new technologies are slowly, bit by bit making helmets more safe for the end consumer… We have to name all the new technology and techniques something!

Cooling factor and head contact surface.

Met don’t take comfort and cooling lightly! This is especially obvious with the Parabellum in the fact they have published the “head contact surface area” online for the helmet along with a “cooling factor” which is calculated as a flow coefficient passing through the vents in a labatory…These figures come in at 55% and 7.5 respectively… Obviously a lower percentage of surface area contact is preferential to keeping you cool with more air being able to get down to your head and therefore giving the helmet a greater cooling factor score.

The Parabellum is the top of the line trail helmet from Met so it’s unsurprising that it’s up there with pretty good scores on both measures!

Conclusion

The RRP of £129.99 is certainly pretty hefty but it’s in the same bracket as the POC Trabec (£129.99 - £194.99) and Troy Lee Designs A1 (£149.99) and to a slightly lesser extent the Urge All-M (with RRP of 99.99) which I’m sure you’ll agree are some of the top helmets on the market today.

The Parabellum will however more than hold it’s own in a tough and crowded market!

More tech squeezed into a trail helmet than I previously thought was possible. A comfortable package that looks cool and has all the features to make it work for a whole variety of different riders.

You can find out more about the Parabellum and all other helmets from Met here...

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