There's plenty of prototypes to see at Eurobike, but here's one we got to wear – a new Rapha prototype jersey that we reckon owes a fair bit to the top worn by Chris Froome in the mountain stages of this year's Tour de France.

Keen observers will have noticed the extremely lightweight and almost transparent team jersey Chris Froome was wearing on the mountain stages in the Tour de France this year. That was a specially produced jersey for Team Sky, but the prototype jersey that Rapha let us have a sneak peek (and brief ride in) clearly looks to take inspiration from it.

 

The most distinctive thing about the jersey is the see-through appearance of the lightweight mesh fabric. There's a close knit weave on the front panels and around the back, and a larger more open mesh fabric on the side panels. We had a quick spin in it while testing a Pinarello Dogma Hydro, but the ride was too short to really assess its performance. What we can say is that the the mesh panels are a very fine weave – imagine airtex woven from the finest Himalayan cotton by shaolin monks…  but more technical sort of a thing. It's also very obviously an extreme conditions jersey in the same vein as the one Froome wore in those hot mountain stages. We haven't tested the latest version of the Lightweight hot conditions jersey in the Rapha range, but Jo who wore it does have one of the original Lightweight jerseys and he reckons this is roughly half its weight. So light then.

And that's about all we know – they were relunctant to share any more details with us. One final observation is the new colourway, with the very subtle grey arm band which goies very nicely with the white or looks a bit boring – depending on your point of view. We're guessing this is one of the the colours the final jersey will be – the original Rapha.Lightweight Jersey was white too when it first came out. Oh, and one final, final observation – look out for a lot of grey in 2015, just giving  you an early heads up/warning.