Selle Italia Shock Absorber Kit

The Selle Italia Shock Absorber kit is a nice all-in-one option if you're looking to add a bit of comfort to the front of your bike. The kit has everything you need, and the performance is good; it's a fairly expensive way of adding more padding, though.

• Pros: Extra comfort, good quality tape
• Cons: Pad adhesive weak, expensive

In the box you get two rolls of tape and four pads, along with the bits and pieces necessary to finish the installation: extra tape sections to cover the lever brackets, bar end plugs and tape. Two of the pads are shaped to follow the contour of the bar curve from the tops to the hoods, and the others are straight to attach to the drops. The pads themselves are gel, with a Lycra cover and an adhesive strip along the back to hold them in place when you're taping.

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The pads look very bulky when you first place them on the bar, and the adhesive isn't very strong so they tend to fall off and move about a bit. Once you start taping the bar they compress quite a bit, and the resulting bar profile isn't hugely increased in size.

The bar tape itself is high quality, with a microfibre base and a textured rubber outer. It's not very flexible so it's not the easiest to work into the nooks and crannies, but it's very strong so you can wrap it nice and tight without fear of it snapping. You may or may not want Selle Italia logos all over your bars; you can wrap it in the other direction to hide them. Make sure you don't reverse the tape direction around the levers, though, or you could end up with logos on one bit and not the other.

In use the tape itself is very good. It's hardwearing and it offers excellent grip whether it's wet or dry. The pads do have an effect, although it's fairly subtle. Over a long ride (8 hours) I found that I was less troubled by tingly hands than I would be with just a normal wrap of tape, but the Shock Absorber Kit didn't really make the bar feel that different.

The tape itself is quite solid, so it doesn't feel like there's too much give in it, but the combination of the pads and the tape is better overall than just a really soft tape, and more hardwearing. This isn't like fitting a suspension fork or anything, it's just an incremental comfort gain, and it doesn't cost you much in terms of a weight penalty.

It does cost you in terms of actual cash, though: 40 quid is a fair wedge for some bar tape, although some (Supacaz Sticky Kush and Fizik Terra Microtex Tacky, to name two) retail for north of 30 on their own. Both of those offer good levels of comfort, too. Buying pads and tape separately can work out cheaper, and Fizik's equivalent boxed set costs £14 less at retail.

> 9 ways to make your bike more comfortable

Of course, if you're re-taping your bars then you have ample shock absorbing material to stick under your new bar tape, in the shape of your old bar tape. My preferred route is still to cut some pads from the old stuff to stick under the new where I need it, as it's cheaper, and also means you can tailor the padding to be specifically what you want.

If you're looking for an easy-to-fit solution out of the box, though, this is a decent buy even if it is a bit expensive.

Verdict

Good quality bar tape with a useful extra level of padding