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Arai Tour X sees Don Remo ride again
26 June 2026
Arai Tour X sees Don Remo ride again
Back in the day, Paul’s Browne’s head was turned by a young lady.
So smitten was he that thought he’d best protect that head and, selfless as ever, that of his beau.
Arai’s Tour X helmets protected the carefree couple as they hit long continental American roads. The relationship endured and indeed flourished, as did the lid…..
Once upon a simpler time, a girl I’d been seeing for a while and I headed off on the adventure of a lifetime.
We rocked up in Toronto, bought a couple of bikes, and set about riding from there to Alaska.
As we still liked each other at that point, we continued south and some ten wonderful months later we road into a town called Ushuaia in the very bottom tip of South America.
Headed off
Before we went anywhere we kitted ourselves out with all the necessary bits, including new helmets.
For both of us there was only ever going to be one brand of lid and that was Arai.
The model we both chose was the Tour X.
The peak was detachable, the visor black and the jaw shaped like an MX helmet.
It was the most comfortable helmet I’d ever worn.
Now more years than I’d care to acknowledge later the Japanese company have released the fifth generation of that now iconic helmet.
The new one is still as clever as it ever was.
The peak and the visor can be left on in an ‘adventure’ setup.
The visor can be removed so that it can be used as a motocross lid, while the peak can be removed and the helmet given a much more road bias.
It’s a very clever piece of kit indeed.
Racing case
One of the things about Arai is that all of their development comes from racing.
They also only make helmets and are a family business going back three generations.
They know what they’re doing.
The top of the range helmet is the RX-7 and its features have worked their way back to the rest of the range, including the Tour X.
To that end the vent covers are designed to simply break off in the event of an accident, as is the peak. This is where the range of helmets display their design genius.
Head first
The problem with ‘using’ a helmet is the simple fact that if one parts company with one’s steed, the head tends to land first and the weight of the body follows very shortly afterwards.
This causes all sorts of problems as the energy created in the impact needs to go somewhere. That somewhere tends to be the rider’s neck and other bits we’d rather leave undisturbed.
So what Arai have done is to design a helmet that will slide away and dissipate that same energy as it does so, rather than delivering it to the rider in one catastrophic blow.
It is, after all, not the falling that kills you, it’s the landing. This property, that Arai call ‘Glancing off’, makes that landing so, so, much more effective at keeping the wearer alive.
No small part of this is how the visor integrates with this glancing off idea.
It has a bigger area than the previous model and as a side effect has improved visibility. It comes with a ‘pinlock’. This ensures that the visor doesn’t fog up.
Easy does it
With reference to the conditions that it might/should be worn in the visor is incredibly easy to take off, clean and replace.
This also makes it simple to change from one style to another as the visor’s hinge is the key point to taking the peak off.
There are a few other new things about the helmet that I like.
The Arai logo is now a vent cover and the new chin vent appears to be more effective.
The ‘AR’ spoiler is very clever.
All of the lining, even the straps, can be removed for cleaning.
As an aside, when we took on that adventure, we both stuck the words, DON’T REMOVE on the jaw guards of out helmets.
We didn’t want a good Samaritan making a bad situation worse by pulling against a possibly injured back or spine.
As we rode on all the letters fell off mine, but only the ‘T and the VE fell off hers’, leaving DON REMO. With the Tour X5 Don Remo rides again…
