At•las |atles| noun
(pl. at•las•es) (also atlas vertebra) Anatomy of the topmost vertebra of the backbone, articulating with the occipital bone of the skull. ORIGIN late 16th cent. (Originally denoted a person who supported a great burden): via Latin from Greek Atlas. At•las |atles| Greek Mythology
One of the Titans, condemned by Zeus to support the heavens upon his shoulders.
The Atlas Brace is racer designed, racer tested, and has been developed around the necks of championship winning professionals. With the development team lead by former Supercross and Motocross racer Brady Sheren, team Atlas was able to create a revolutionary new device that aims to solve many of the problematic criteria that exists with neck protection today. Using advanced materials and breakthroughs in safety, the Atlas challenges the traditional methods of neck protection. By creating an innovative design that is stronger, safer, flexible, more adjustable, more comfortable, and extremely simplistic, the Atlas provides advanced protection with none of the bulky trapped feeling, all at a great price.
Brady Sheren and Brad Mclean both grew up racing MX and in the motorcycle industry, their fathers both were Icons in the Canadian motorcycle industry; Brady’s father, Rick Sheren was the founder of R&M Motorsports, President of Tucker Rocky Canada and President of Mechanix Wear Canada and SIXSIXONE Canada. Brady has had a very prestigious career as a top Canadian MX racer, racing in both Canada and the United States, and is now transferring that experience over to designing innovative products made to fit racers needs. Brad’s father Bill Mclean was a multi national Canadian MX champion and founder of Pacific Yamaha in Vancouver, BC. Brad also has many years experience as a MX racer, race team manager, retail shop employee, and sales associate at SIXSIXONE Canada.
Chadd and Cameron Cole have a similar story, being the sons of Eddie Cole who was the founder and President of Answer Products, Protaper, Manitou, SIXSIXONE, Tag Metals, Sunline and Filtron. Both Chadd and Cameron were introduced to the motorcycle industry at an early age, and continue to be heavily involved year after year.
Brady, Brad, Chadd, and Cameron are also the founders and owners of Matrix Concepts. Matrix was launched in 2009, and is now in over 30 countries and is used by nearly every professional Factory Race team in the USA.
Atlas is extremely unique when it comes to neck brace technology. Every Atlas brace is based on flexible technology. By incorporating various areas of flex into the neck brace, the brand’s goal is to not only reduce the forces on the head and neck, but also for the neck brace itself to dissipate, and possibly reduce those impact forces before they reach the other areas of the body. By sitting around the spine and sternum and using dual chest and back supports, Atlas already increases the surface area that the brace rests on the body, which can help to spread out these impact forces rather than concentrate them in small areas. This flexible technology creates many unique characteristics that are not possible to achieve with rigid designs, and which is why Atlas believes so strongly in its products.
Atlas’ mission was to create a testing method that could get as close to mimicking real life as possible. To do this, the brand used a 3rd party team of experts to perform the testing, so it was able to obtain un-bias results that were not under its own influence or design. The bulk of Atlas’ impact testing has been performed by Dynamic Research, Inc. (DRI) in Torrance, CA by its extremely knowledgeable staff of bio-mechanical engineers and doctors, of which some are regular off-road motorcycle riders themselves who understand riders’ needs and what kind of dangerous scenarios they may be faced with.
The team at DRI has previous experience testing neck braces, and it had multiple ideas on how to not only better the technology, but also ways to better the testing performed on them. DRI’s team completely started from scratch to come up with something radically different that would provide Atlas with useful repeatable tests and more accurate data from scenarios, which it sees in real life. Mission accomplished...
Just like its product, Atlas wanted to think outside the box when creating its test rig. Since most crashes they as riders experience are very violent and can include multi-directional forces experienced all at the same time, a better real-world testing method needed to be developed. The team at DRI was able to develop and create a custom-built, repeatable forward/downward pendulum test rig (think Superman in a flying position) that not only measures deflection in the direction of Atlas’ choice, but also compression to the head and neck caused by the secondary action of the body’s weight crashing down behind the head as it typically does in various violent motorcycle crashes. With its one-of-a-kind test rig, Atlas is able to repeat controlled tests with its dummy face up, face down, and/or sideways with impacts into a custom-built adjustable-angle surface to mimic various scenarios of common crashes. For example, with its dummy swinging horizontally to the ground, face down, into a 90-degree surface, Atlas is able to simulate a very common “lawn dart” scenario of a rider going over the bars and impacting head first into the ground, a berm, or an upcoming jump face. This type of testing gives the brand extremely useful and repeatable test data that it can use to further develop its products and the impacts that they face.
Atlas’ dummy is made up of an instrumented upper torso surrogate fitted with a Hybrid III head-form and a Motorcycle Anthropometric Test Device (MATD) neck, which was specifically developed (and certified) by DRI to be more realistic for data acquisition during motorcycle crash scenarios than a standard car crash type neck. Previous research at Dynamic Research has indicated that on the Hybrid III test dummy, the shoulder position relative to the head and neck is too low and not realistic of a 50th percentile adult male. In order to remedy this situation, a special upper torso was fabricated using a 50th percentile adult male as a casting model. Special attention was paid to the location of the shoulders relative to the head and neck in order to confirm that the surrogate was representative of the 50th percentile adult male. Instrumentation on the surrogate included a 9-accelerometer array mounted inside the Hybrid III head-form for measurement of linear and angular accelerations as well as a 6-degree of freedom upper neck load cell that monitored three dimensional forces and moments. A digital high-speed video camera collecting data at 1000 frames per second is used to capture all impacts. The complete upper torso fixture and the MATD neck are shown below.
Throughout all of DRI’s testing, each test scenario was performed with and without an Atlas brace to provide comparative results. At Atlas, they were very pleased to find positive results in every impact scenario they performed, and that in each situation wearing an Atlas brace was successful in reducing the forces to the head and neck, comparative to not wearing an Atlas brace in the same impacts. Although this does not in any way guarantee an injury will not be sustained or that an injury could be reduced, it does give the brand extremely valuable data related to its products performance, while helping to further the development and understanding of impacts that riders may experience, and how it can work to better control these forces in attempt to lesson the severity of them on the body. While its testing is unique, and not directly comparative to some of its competitors testing, Atlas still feels very strongly that neck braces are a vital component of rider safety and should be highly considered as part of every rider’s program.
In addition to its rigorous one-of-a-kind lab testing performed in the USA, the Atlas brace is also lab tested in Europe to meet various CE standards. The Atlas brace conforms with the requirements of the European Directive 89/686/EEC concerning Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), along with EN 1621-2 :2003 which relates to clothing/motorcyclists’ back protectors against mechanical impact, EN 340:2003 for general requirements of protective clothing, and also me-int 074-00 which tests ergonomics and tensile strength. CE is the only current certification available for neck braces, and Atlas is proud to meet these requirements.
Oftentimes man creates devices which perform extremely well in lab scenarios, but pose multiple challenges in the real world. This is extremely relevant in regards to protection products. During the initial design phase of the Atlas brace, the brand found this to be a very difficult task to overcome and searched for the best way to combine mobility and comfort with safety and protection. Since the development was lead by a former professional motocross racer, Atlas was able to carefully develop this mix over a 3-year period of rider testing. The brand credits a huge portion of this to the real world rider testing with multiple professional rider’s input/feedback, as well as the developmental input from the team at DRI who had a big influence on how to create a controlled flexible design that would provide the safety results we were looking for. The results are exactly what they, at Atlas, hoped for, and they believe that having current and former Champions Ryan Villopoto and Jake Weimer choose to wear their product shows that they have created a great product. When asked about riders who choose to wear, or not wear a neck brace, this is what Ryan Villopoto had to say: “For me, it’s a choice I make, and even if a neck brace only helped me one percent, that’s a one percent advantage I have and it’s only going to help.”