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Newish road bike has white bar tape that is looking pretty shabby very quickly.
Want some boring black...what's comfy/good/etc? Cork preferably (I think!).
Sram/Cinelli look good@£8 a pop.
Cheers
I swear by fizik performance thick tape(feels like velvet) 🙂
Hard wearing and looks lush !! Bit pricier though but well worth it
I've just put some Cinelli Cork Gel tape on - quite thick and squeezy, perhaps a bit thicker than I expected.
You could always clean your white bar tape - rubbing it with baby wipes will get rid of a lot of the grease and grime.
If you must have white, I recommend Decathlon at £5 a go. It cleans up pretty well and looked like the OEM tape Giant supply.
For other colours, Fizik microtape, with gel padding or cabon bars.
Fizik performance tape is very nice, a bit harder to wrap than cinelli if you're doing it yourself.
I like the Cannondale Synapse tape personally. Quite thick, a little padding, goes on pretty easily.
+1 fizik.
I have fizik, Spesh roubaix, and Lizard Skins DSP on my road bikes (all black). All are great and I'd recommend any of them. New to me is the LS DSP, quite different to the others, and I'm really liking it so far.
Cinelli cork every time for me, for comfort and durability, also wraps nicely.
found regular Specialized S-Wrap black a great tape
it feels good, is comfortable, durable and very easy to wrap tight, even on odd shaped aero bars
I've settled on Specialized Roubaix also. Nice and squishy, easy to wrap and survives removal and re-wrapping well.
you could get some inexpensive black stuff (I bought some from PX a while back that was a bargain and decent quality) and wrap it over the existing white
hey presto, paris-roubaix tried and tested solution that looks boss
-1 Fizik for me. Too thin. Fine for an hour on chaingang but it's not comfy enough if I'm going out for three/four hours.
Fizik is nice, but can be hard to wrap. Cinelli feels nice, but easy to tear when applying and not that hard wearing because of the cork texture. Deda is cheap as chips (usually around £5 online from Merlin), very flexible so easy to wrap, soft to grip and hard wearing. Just don't buy the more expensive Deda (I think they call it Mistral). A bugger to wrap and very slippery to the touch. Not grippy at all.
-1 Fizik for me. Too thin.
Is that the 2mm or the 3mm? Had no such problems with long rides on the 3mm.
Had the cheap Deda stuff on the turbo bike, found it very slippy with sweaty hands, so probably not great in the wet. Swapped for Spesh Roubaix which is a lot better.
Specialized S-Wrap cork for me too. Lovely tape
reuse old bar tape on top of bars/in the drops and taped on with electrical tape for comfy palm areas. i used planet x stuff as i picked some up when i was in the shop in barnsley, pretty good for £3 odd
Is that the 2mm or the 3mm? Had no such problems with long rides on the 3mm.
I didn't know they did different thicknesses. I must always end up with the thinner stuff because there wasn't much to any Fizik tape I've used.
Very happy with the SRAM stuff, tried it on my road bike and went straight for the same again when I needed some for commuter.
Life's too short for white bar tape IMO!
Fizik do 3 thicknesses?
Last time I went into sigma sport they had a bar setup with all 3 tapes so you could grip and feel before choosing, neat idea
Specialized Phat Wrap with gel pads underneath - can't be beaten in my opinion - it's expensive but as much as LS DSP….
Lizard Skins DSP. Properly lovely tape, especially the 3.2
Easton cork tape, non sticky (only if you can wrap bars correctly mind)
Lizard Skin DSP +1
Lizard Skins DSP is lovely but the Pro Digial stuff is very similar.
My personal favorite is the Cinelli Volee.
Just a thought...I have Easton aero bars which are pretty wide on the tops and will therefore need more tape.
Wondering if these suggestions will be long enough...the difference to wrap shouldn't be that much.
I always have some left over so you should be fine if you don't overlap too much. Also if you were a bit short, you don't need to wrap that far along the top anyway as you never grip the bars close to the stem.
I got cinelli cork gel because it was the cheapest stuff I could find, and I really like it, lovely and soft