Alpinestars Tech-Air Race 

Nottingham, December 2011. Alpinestars presented its groundbreaking new Air Bag racing suit to the UK press at one of their UK dealers. The suit based on the Racing Replica features a highly sophisticated "ECU" so to say connected to five active sensors (when armed) on the suit. These sensors knows when a rider is moving at low speed on a motorcycle and then it arms itself provided that the 8 hour capacity battery is sufficiently charged. In active mode the sensors samples data every second millisecond from all five sensors and when armed Alpinestars algorithms are able to determine whether the rider is having a crash or not. If the sensors and the control unit determines you are crashing the micro processor initiates a firing process. Within 45 milliseconds one of the nitrogen gas canisters will have inflated the air bags by help of a pyrotechnic charge. The second canister is in reserve should a rider re-mount the motorcycle after a first crash. If somebody should be unfortunate enough to crash three times then you'd be back to basics until you could service the unit replacing the gas canisters. The whole set-up adds 450 grams of weight to the suit. Motorcycle racers don't high side as much as they did in the two-stroke 500GP era but you still get lots of collar bone injuries which are painful and takes long to heal. The Tech Air Race suit will to a certain degree be able to prevent such injuries and as such is great news for professional racers. Alpinestars have set the RRP to £5.400/€6.000 so we really are talking about pioneering work here as very few will be able to afford one now in the first couple of years. Alpinestars are hoping and planning to bring this technology to more areas in their protective range but in 2011 we are still a few years away from such a step up. One of many benefits to the Alpinestars set-up is that the system is entirely self sufficient when fully serviced and as such does not rely on any external power source or sensors. The potential is enormous once the price can go down as these sensors can be placed anywhere and there are no limit to how many gas canisters that are in place or garment. We can see that future extreme sports athletes become real Supermen in the future. Jorge Lorenzo's crash at Laguna Seca 2011 recorded a whopping 54G's on impact and it's this type of unimaginable force that this air-bag system can aid in protecting our water filled bodies. The current Tech Air Race suit has been under development for a full ten years now. If you're looking for that cat's seventh life then this suit will be worth every penny but it's very pricey. By Tor Sagen