Kenton Koch Wins GT4 Pro-Am Class at COTA Wearing Flying Eyes: The First Eyewear Engineered to Be Worn Inside the Helmet

Random Vandals Racing’s entire team wears Flying Eyes during competition because, unlike fashion eyewear, they actually fit under helmets and headsets.

Kenton Koch and Sam Craven of Random Vandals Racing won the GT4 Pro-Am class at the GT America powered by AWS race weekend at Circuit of The Americas, April 24–26, 2026, sharing driving duties in the same car. Koch wore Flying Eyes prescription ophthalmic frames inside his helmet during his stints, and the entire Random Vandals crew wore Flying Eyes throughout the weekend, whether under a full-face helmet or beneath a comms headset on pit wall.

It is, on its face, a small detail. But it points to a problem the motorsports industry has quietly tolerated for decades: the eyewear professional racers actually need has never existed.

Major eyewear brands have poured tens of millions of dollars into motorsports sponsorships, outfitting drivers with sunglasses to wear in the paddock, on the podium, and in front of cameras. Those glasses are not designed to fit inside a helmet. Racers who need vision correction will sometimes wear regular prescription glasses or off-the-shelf sunglasses inside a helmet or under a headset anyway, because they have to, and pay for it in pressure points, hot spots, and noise leaks for the duration of every session. The problem has only gotten worse: modern helmets must fit tighter to meet current safety standards, and modern noise-attenuating headsets rely on clamping force to protect hearing. Conventional eyewear was never designed for either environment.

Flying Eyes Optics solves this with a patented, fundamentally different design. The company’s Resilamide™ temples are 1mm thick (thinner than a credit card) and flexible enough to seat against the skull without pinching, pressure, or audio interference. Lenses block 100% of UVA and UVB light and are intentionally non-polarized, because polarization can mask glare cues and digital displays critical to drivers and pilots. The frames are stylish enough to wear walking around the paddock, but their actual job is to disappear once the helmet goes on.