Kevlar®

A high-speed crash is always a dangerous event. Nobody wants to experience one behind the bars. But every rider also knows it can happen, which is why it pays to be prepared — because the prepared rider comes away less hurt. Some lessons come from riding school, others only from time on the road or the track. If you've got a minute, we'd like to share some interesting material-engineering facts applied to real riding gear. It might just be the reason you update your riding wardrobe and get ready for situations that catch out even the most experienced riders.

Right now, research teams around the world are racing to out-do each other with the next application built on nanotechnology. And yet, oddly enough, the best material for motorcycle gear is still a natural one — leather. Where did the engineers go wrong? Well, let's be fair: leather is an excellent, seriously tough material, but only when the approach to developing and building the final piece of gear is done properly. A leather motorcycle jacket or leather suit can look great and be affordable, but if it isn't engineered and stitched correctly, it won't perform — especially in the situations you only really test out once the tarmac "holds up a mirror" to you. At 4SR, through years of working with professional racers who go down almost every race weekend, we're constantly refining every element of our leather gear to make it as safe as possible, for racers and everyday riders alike. You can read more, for example, in our article on the patented 4SR seam.

That said, there are plenty of situations where leather gear isn't the obvious choice. Hot weather, short trips, or needing to walk into somewhere more formal right after riding. Still, riding in jeans and a cotton hoodie isn't exactly cool anymore — more like reckless. We've got a solution for that...

You've probably heard of Kevlar already.

Every now and then, riders get lucky and something seriously useful escapes the lab. That's exactly what happened in 1965, when poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide came out of the hands of a bespectacled genius in a white coat. Let's just call it Kevlar®. Thanks to its unique properties, it's found its way into countless industries. It's stronger and lighter than steel, has excellent abrasion resistance, and holds onto its properties even at very high temperatures. At 160°C, for example, it loses under 10% of its strength — and only after 500 hours. At that temperature, any competing fibre has either already melted or simply doesn't exist anymore. Picture the mechanics of coming off a bike and sliding down the tarmac, and Kevlar's properties turn out to be exactly what's needed. As anyone who's studied how prehistoric hunters made fire knows, friction generates heat — and a rider sliding on tarmac generates plenty of it. Kevlar, essentially, doesn't care about heat...

For building motorcycle gear, Kevlar® is genuinely unmatched. During a crash and the slide that follows, contact surfaces heat up past 200°C. That's hot enough to cause second-degree burns on a rider's skin without ever breaking through the outer material of the gear. Even in that situation, temperature-stable Kevlar holds onto its strength.

At 4SR we set out to give riders an alternative to leather gear that's both functional and genuinely safe. That's why our online store carries a range of kevlar hoodies and kevlar jeans. The hoodies are made from a single-layer fabric blend of 60% Kevlar and 40% cotton. Each component in the blend does a specific job. Kevlar, as covered above, is heat-resistant. At equal weight it's also up to 5 times stronger in tension than steel, which gives it unmatched resistance to tearing or cutting. Cotton keeps the fabric breathable and light. And 4SR makes the hoodie safe and affordable. Our motorcycle jeans again use Kevlar® by DuPont. The jeans come fitted with a set of Safe Tec protectors carrying the highest safety certification — Level 2 T+. On the knee protectors of our kevlar jeans, we're proud to offer our own patented protector-mounting system, which keeps the protector exactly where it should be in any position. (more in a separate article)