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The story of Skully is starting to sound more and more like a script for a soap opera, and today’s installment sees former Skully employee Isabelle Faithhauer bringing suit in the San Francisco County Superior Court against Skully and its founders Marcus Weller and Mitchell Weller.

Faithhauer is the former-assistant to Skully CEO Marcus Weller, and for a time, served as the company’s bookkeeper. In her complaint she alleges that Skully wrongfully terminated her, and brings several other causes of action that are related to that wrongful termination.

However in her filing with the court, Faithhauer also lists a number of incidents where Marcus Weller and Mitchell Weller allegedly used company funds to buy exotic cars, rent expensive apartments in San Francisco, and travel around the world.

If true, this sort of spending could help explain why Skully ran out of capital, and then officially closed its doors last week, despite having raised roughly $15 million from investors and would-be customers.

You can read the full filing of Faithhauer’s complaint against Skully and the Wellers here, which is a PDF hosted by the San Francisco County Superior Court and a public record.

Skully on Friday finally acknowledged what has already been known in the motorcycling community: the company was going out of business. The news comes after a last-minute effort by the remaining management to secure a new round of funding.

With $15 million down the drain, work still to do before the Skully AR-1 would be ready to ship, and a growing group of disgruntled early adopters, Skully’s resurrection was not to be.

Instead in a letter to backers and customers, Skully announced that it would be filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy procedure for companies that are going out of business. This news, of course, directly impacts the thousands of motorcyclists who were expecting to receive a Skully AR-1 helmet.

It was just two weeks ago that we told you about Skully’s investors ousting brothers Marcus Weller and Mitch Weller from the San Francisco startup, and today TechCrunch reports that the motorcycle helmet company will be rather swiftly closing its doors.

A&R readers may remember that Skully’s latest delay to market stemmed from the Skully AR-1 helmet not being ready for mass production, despite the nearly $15 million raised through seed money and a Series A funding round, which was led by Intel Capital.

As such, the closure surely stems from Skully’s investors choosing to shut down the company’s operations, rather than rebuild Skully’s tarnished reputation and retool its product for mass production.

According to TechCrunch, operations at Skully have already ceased, and the website is expected to go offline later today, though as of this writing Skully’s website remains, and its social marketing team is still on Facebook cooling the heels of angry customers.

TechCrunch is reporting, and our sources have confirmed, that the investors behind the Skully AR-1 helmet have ousted one of the company’s founders, Marcus Weller, along with his brother Mitch Weller. For those who don’t know, Marcus Weller was Skully’s CEO, while Mitch Weller served as the company’s Chief of Staff.

The departure of the Weller brothers comes after Skully continually missed its delivery deadlines with its first product, the Skully AR-1, which is a helmet with an integrated rear-facing camera, small computer system, and heads-up-display oculus.

The Skully AR-1 helmet debuted to much fanfare, but it soon became clear that the company’s leadership wasn’t up to the task on delivering the promises they were making to the public. Seemingly on a different page with their investors as well, Marcus and Mitch Weller were fired by the company’s Board of Directors.

It looks like Martin Fitcher, Skully’s current COO, will take over the reigns for the company, or what’s left of it, as its new CEO. Hopefully this means that Skully will finally get on the right path and begin delivery helmets to its plethora of early backers. We are not holding our breath, however.

Another year, and another Italian GP at Mugello. As usual, this means that we have another special AGV helmet from Valentino Rossi to show you.

This year’s helmet is called “Mugiallo” – a play on the Italian word for yellow (“giallo”) and of course the Mugello race track – and is the work of Aldo Drudi, the same man who made the Burasca 1200 that we showed you yesterday.

As you can see from the photos attached, the AGV Pista GP helmet features “Mugiallo” across the crown of the neon helmet, with Rossi’s “46” stenciled on the top of the rear spoiler.

On the nape of the helmet, Rossi’s two dogs (Cesare and Cecilia) and cat (Rossano) are featured, while the Italian flag is on either side of the chin. The top of the helmet as the layout of the Mugello circuit drawn on it.

As we saw during Saturday’s qualifying sessions, the bright neon yellow helmet really stands out on the time sheets.

Future Skully AR-1 owners will have to continue waiting for their helmets, as Skully has once again pushed back the delivery date of its heads-up display powered helmet.

The announcement is another blow for the San Francisco based startup, as Skully has gone from the media darling to full-blown vaporware-pusher over the past two years.

We say this because Skully first launched in 2013, with promises of helmets in the hands of consumers by the end of 2014. That date was then pushed back to May 2015, in conjunction with Skully’s Kickstarter campaign launch. That date would be revised again, this time to the end of the year 2015.

Now well into the fourth month of 2016, Skully is pushing back its delivery date again, though it isn’t giving a firm timeline when the production units will finally reach purchasers. It should be noted that as of this date, only a handful of pre-production units have made it the hands of specially chosen evangelists buyers.

Episode 16 of the Two Enthusiasts Podcast is another jam-packed show, for your aural pleasure.

Quentin and myself cover some of the moto-specific releases from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), such as BMW’s HUD helmet and laser-power headlight, along with the advances Yamaha is making with its MotoBot project, and the future of wearables and personal video.

We also dive into a weighty discussion on the use of quickshifters on modern sport bikes, and how their use can affect the life of a motorcycles transmission.

We also find out that Quentin is a sucker for a good IPA, that Corona will never sponsor the show, and that I have perhaps spent too much time (and money) in West Hollywood. Also, King Leopold II of Belgium was kind of a jerk.

As always, you can listen to the show via the embedded SoundCloud player, after the jump, or you can find the show on iTunes (please leave a review) or this RSS feed. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well. Enjoy the show!

The narrative that surrounds the Bell helmet brand is a long and storied one, with some of the more interesting bits happening in just recent time, as the brand’s many different elements and organizations have finally come back together under one roof.

As such, Bell is keen on changing some of the perceptions of its products, especially in the motorcycle space, and has made great strides in doing so with its latest crop of Star helmets.

A full-featured race helmet, priced to undercut the top offerings from AGV, Arai, Shoei, et al, the Bell Star now sees its successor, the Bell Pro Star progeny coming to market.

We don’t talk a lot about gear here on Asphalt & Rubber, but that is slowing going to change in the coming months, and we wanted to give a nod to what Bell is up to with the Pro Star.

Every year Arai Helmet comes out with a highly coveted limited edition lid for the Isle of Man TT; and each year has a different design, with the latest crop coming from the studio of Aldo Drudi.

This year’s design comes on the Arai Corsair-X, a helmet we were very impressed with when we tested it at Thunder Hill last year.

As you can see from the photos, Drudi has emblazoned the Corsair-X helmet with the “TT” logo, as well as the island nation’s Triskelion symbol, which is of three running legs. “Ellan Vannin” is of course the native Manx name for the Isle of Man.

You don’t have to be a raging Ducati Corse fan, or even a fan of Andrea Iannone, in order to appreciate the humor in the Italian rider’s winter test helmet this week at Sepang.

In case you missed it, the bright red AGV Pista GP helmet is adorned with a familiar face, Gavin the seagull. If you don’t remember Gavin, we are sure the mentioning of last year’s Phillip Island race will help jog your memory.

Coming down the hill, into Turn 10, Andrea Iannone found a spectator whose vantage point was a little too close to the action. The seagull, finally realizing the error of his ways, took flight, though not in time to avoid the outcome everyone feared.

The bird struck Iannone’s Ducati Desmosedici GP15, while it was in mid-flight, leaving a gaping whole in the front of the race bike and a puff of feathers in its wake.

Joking aside, Iannone was lucky not to be injured in the collision, and actually went on to take third in the race. Bird strikes are not uncommon at Phillip Island, and they can cause grave injuries when they occur at speed. Thankfully for Iannone, Turn 10 is one of the slowest corners on the Australian track.

While we mourn the loss of Gavin, as he has made his way to the big race track in the sky, it is good to see that he has not been forgotten. A few photos of Iannone’s helmet are after the jump.

Are you ready for another post about helmets, especially one with integrated technology? Sure you are, Sparky – and you will be happy to learn about this collaboration between Bell Helmets and a company called 360fly.

Like the Nikon KeyMission video camera, 360fly’s system captures everything around the rider in 4k video resolution, and then creates a video that can be viewed from an immersive virtual-reality perspective.

Thanks to a built-in GPS, altimeter/barometer, and accelerometer, the 360fly system is capable of overlaying telemetry data into its video, among a variety of other features. What really separates the unit from the rest though is what is in the pipeline from 360fly.