Kask are best known as helmet supplier to Team Sky but the Italian firm’s branching out in 2016 with the launch of a range of sunglasses.
While Chris Froome et al won’t be using the new sunglasses, owing to an existing eyewear sponsorship agreement with Oakley, the Australian UCI Pro Continental-registered Drapac team will.
The Tour Down Under starts on Tuesday (January 19) but Drapac riders debuted the sunglasses at the pre-race People’s Choice Classic criterium on Sunday (January 17), won by Orica-GreenEDGE’s 21-year-old sprinter, Caleb Ewan.
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Kask are remaining tight-lipped on details until spring but, unsurprisingly, say the sunglasses are specifically designed to work best with Kask helmets. Besides that, what is obvious, however, is that the glasses are designed to offer an uninterrupted field of vision, with a large one-piece lens which extends across the bridge of the nose, like the POC Do Blade and Oakley Jawbreaker glasses.
Two-time Olympic gold medallist Graeme Brown is one of the Drapac riders using the new glasses Down Under, where temperatures are forecast to nudge 40 degrees for stage one on Tuesday, and the Australian is also riding a new bike for the race – SwiftCarbon’s first aero bike, the HyperVox.
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Again, official details are scarce ahead of a proper launch but what we can see from the photo below is that the frame utilises truncated Kammtail tube profiles popular on aero bikes.
Swift have also sought to keep things as clean as possible by using an integrated seatpost clamp and neat internal cable routing which sees the cables enter flush with the frame.
Otherwise, Brown’s bike is equipped with a SRAM Red 22 mechanical groupset and, for the People’s Choice Classic at least, deep-section Zipp 808 wheels.
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