During my time in rallying I have sometimes wondered about the mismatch between the high level of cars and the low level of helmets&suits people use. Many times you see top of the line cars with Motec engine management, Reiger suspension, best engines money can buy etc. Then you see the driver wearing a 5 year old helmet and a suit that would fit more to garage working than driving the car. Both the helmet
and the suit not the best available to begin with. If you ever ask about the suit or the helmet the answer usually is that "they are expensive". I understand lower requirements on the driving equipment
if you have a tight budget as a regular Joe and driving as a hobby every now and then. But when you have a 30 000 – 200 000 eur car and spend 15 000 – 100 000 every year for driving the season then does the
extra 1 000 eur for upgrading the helmet and the suit really matter? Might even look better in the eyes of the current and potential sponsors.
As a co-driver life is easier for me since I don't have to buy the car, tires, maintenance, service trucks etc. On my seat you also notice the difference of the equipment. You get what you pay for. Item by item I
have increased the quality of products that I use. For last season I upgraded my suit and later in the season also my helmet.
I spent a lot of time searching in the internet for different suits by different manufacturers. I ended up with a suit from MIR Raceline in Italy. The manufacturer is more known from karting, but makes also rally, rallycross and racing suits with the latest FIA standards. The pricing for a custom made suit with requested colours and embroidering was the best I could find. I personally like to pay for a product and not the brand so that's why I didn't immediately go for the more known Sparco/OMP/Alpinestars brands and end up paying for the brand and not the product. Especially the embroidering was important for me since the thread needs to be fire proof material and only penetrate the outer layer of the suit. Quite a hassle trying to
get the sponsor logos to a standard suit after it has been manufactured. Also in the scrutineering the officials quickly see that everything is factory made and don't have to spend their time too much checking the suit in detail. When using better driving gear few things really are obvious. For starters the underwear with good design and cutting helps you not noticing that you are wearing them. With the actual suit one thing you immediately notice is the weight. The ones in the higher end of the spectrum are much lighter than the cheap ones. No surprises in the previous points. However one thing that surprised me with the MIR suit was the "shining fabric" that I ordered the suit with. Like the name says the fabric really stands out against the normal racing suit fabrics by being shiny. The surprising thing was that it doesn't seem to get shabby so fast as the normal fabrics in racing suits. I have used my suit in testing and races for one year now and usually the suits start to show wear and tear at this point. Especially on the thigh area where I always support the pace note book. This fabric has really stood well against use and looks like brand new.
Before Neste Rally Finland I also decided to change my helmet. I had been really happy using my Peltor G78 which is already a good helmet, but a couple of things had started to annoy me little by little. The
main thing was the microphone boom. With the Peltor boom you always have to be careful not the get it tangled somewhere and always adjust it to its place before the stage. The boom position is especially
annoying if the driver's boom accidentally switches place and you have to listen to heavy breathing on the stage. Makes you feel like you are in a porn movie and if its not extremely disturbing you don't want to
ask the driver to adjust his boom on the stage and momentarily break his concentration :) The other little thing with the Peltor helmet was that even the never G79 model didn't seem to move the game forwards like the best brands always should. I had gotten used to thinking that Peltor is one of the best, but the G79 to my eyes seemed to offer exactly the same as G78. Except in an uglier package. The beauty of design is purely my personal opinion. So I ended up buying a Stilo WRC DES helmet. I like the fixed microphone boom which is integrated to the helmet structure, the good fit when wearing it and the fact that I think it's a good looking helmet. Since my aim is to use the helmet for a long time I started to think about getting a personalized paint job for it. Painting a helmet pretty much eliminates the possibility of selling it unless I suddenly would become world famous... Again the usual internet search: who paints helmets, where and for how much? With this field I also asked experiences from friends. I ended up sending the helmet to Gerard Mariaud in Joutseno. He has been painting everything from motorcycles to helmets for years and years. Again the price also played a significant part. The price spectrum ranging between 200 and 1 000 euros between different painters.
Deciding the design was more difficult. I wanted the helmet to be personal. I went through different designs and figured out what would suit me and in which colour. In the end I figured out the design all by myself. For main colour I chose pearl white. White goes with anything you know. All the graphs would be in black. So a simple black and white helmet. Except that the design isn't what you would call normal. I have Michelin gravel tyre pattern going over the helmet from front to back.
On the right side of the helmet I have a quote from my rally idol Henri Toivonen "The time is not the problem, but my heart you know" If I'm not mistaking it was Henri's comment in an interview during one rally when he was competing against faster 4wd Audi of Michèle Mouton with his 2wd Opel. Anyway it's just something that stuck into my mind when watching Henri Toivonen tribute video over and over again as a kid.
On the left side I have a quote in Finnish from a famous Finnish ski jumper Matti Nykänen. Loosely translated as "Life is human being's best time". Simple but true and one should always remember to live life to the fullest. On the left side I also have a Finnish comic pig Wagner, but I'm playing it safe with the copyright laws and I have blurred Wagner from this picture in the internet. For those who are not familiar with the pig in question it's Finland's most popular comic and is published in Finland's biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. Wagner is sometimes totally inconsiderate, sometimes very thoughtful, sometimes very simple, sometimes very philosophical. Basically full of contradictions. For some reason I have always felt him as a kindred spirit...
One more quote from the movie Forest Gump to end these thoughts about suits and helmets -> "That's all I have to say about that".
