dps214 said:Datsun240ZGuy said:My brother-in-law was a motorcycle mechanic and I asked him about a cheap helmet back in the day.
Cheap helmets are for cheap heads. Spend the money.
It depends. For a motorcycle, absolutely yes. But the nice thing about Snell ratings is that they're all pretty much equally protective (as long as you don't go so cheap that you get some knockoff/falsified Snell compliance garbage). For the most part what the extra money gets you is durability and lightness. Lightness is safety related, but for something that's going to see minimal use and probably exclusively low speed use, neither one is overly critical. I have a sub $300 helmet that has seen probably 20-25 weekends of use per year since 2018 and it's just starting to show its age a little. There's absolutely situations where "spend the money" applies, but one low speed autocross per year isn't one.
Ironically cheap helmets often test better. That's because they typically have one shell size and every other size has more foam. More expensive helmets usually have multiple shell sizes.
