Take a quick tour of my air show flight suits, Red Bull Air Race flight suits, and helmets that I’ve worn throughout the years.

The air show flight suits date back as far as 1999. You’ll see that my partners have evolved throughout the years – from Reebok all the way through WAT (Whelen Aerospace Technologies). Most of my air show suits are made by Simpson Racing right here in the USA. Simpson calls them ‘racing suits’, since the ones I wear are also worn by race car drivers. All of my suits are one or two layer Nomex suits which are fire retardant. I wear a fire retardant undershirt as well for added protection. In later years, AlpineStars (in Italy) manufactured my Aviall and Whelen suits.

Let me show you some of my iconic Red Bull Air Race flight suits. You’ll see the suit from when I won the Budapest race in 2009 and Indy in 2018. Most of these chosen few are my favorites, but there is one that’s an exception to that! Most of these suits have been manufactured by AlpineStars in Italy. Early on, when the g’s and speeds were high, and the race tracks were closer to 2 minutes each, we wore a g-suit. This one was called the Libelle suit, which was designed and produced by Life Support Systems, a Swiss company. This suit used long tubes filled with water to combat high-Gs. It’s like a form fitting wet suit which I did not particularly like to fly in as it was incredibly heavy and hard to fly in.

Helmets are a very personal item for any air show pilot or race car driver. These are my three current helmets and I love the designs. They’ve all been painted by Savage Designs. Mike Savage is well known for his custom racing helmets and he has painted 4 or 5 of my helmets over the last few years. Thanks to Mirco Pecorari and his team for the designs. Mirco’s team is based in Italy and he’s been designing aircraft and helmet paint schemes for years. The helmet from 2019 was designed to match the bold gold paint scheme on my Extra, and now for 2020, my brand new Extra paint scheme matches the design on the helmet. I’ll be unveiling my new paint scheme soon!