Genetic Carbon Micro Fender

The Genetic Carbon Micro Fender has been designed to be as unobtrusive as possible while keeping the spray off your bum. It works, but it's also about as expensive as a mudguard can get.

Sometimes you've just got to ride in the wet on your best machine and while you can use SKS's Race Guards or Crud's RoadRacers to keep the spray and mud off your frame they aren't really going to enhance the looks of your top end bike.

All right so Genetic's Carbon Micro Fender is not exactly going to improve your bike's looks either but it's so small and discrete that you're barely going to even notice it. Designed with the sportivist in mind the brief was to create something that's easy to fit, lightweight and makes no noise once fitted.

It's not going to give you much protection in a downpour but it's only designed to keep the worst of the road spray off of your behind and lower back when the roads are wet or damp. Positioned with the leading edge at top dead centre it stops a surprising amount of water from hitting the back of the bike when used with a 23mm tyre and also keeps a lot out of a following rider's eyes. The arrow style pattern underneath the guard is designed to direct the spray on round the wheel towards the road.

The Carbon part of the name comes from the carbon arm which all helps to keep the weight down to just 124g (72g claimed)for the full assembly. The Carbon Micro Fender fits to the drive side of your quick release and with a bit of tweaking the it's fitted in around five minutes using an Allen key and it all seems pretty secure. It certainly didn't cause any issues during testing.

It's intended primarily for rear wheel use, but with a bit of careful planning you can also fit one up front to the front. That would mean a set of mudguards for £95, from which the mathematicians among you have worked out that one of these costs a whopping £47.50. The quality and construction looks good though, if a little fragile. I wouldn't want to bet on it surviving an impact.

On the whole the Genetic Micro Fender works really well for its small size and it's secure too considering it's only attached at its pivot point. It's a huge price though which seems a little difficult to swallow but considering the high value of the bikes you see on a sportive starting grids these days I suppose everything is relative.

Verdict

Pretty impressive mudguard for its small size but hugely expensive.