Cyclist
In The Drops: Goldilocks Assos kit, CHPT3 cycling trainers, SunGod sunglasses, Sa Calobra and cassette tapes
Good afternoon, good Friday. I hope, dear reader, your mettle is in fine fettle and your week has been hitherto resplendent.
I believe Tuesday will have been your best day, what with it being statistically the most productive day of the week (specifically between 9am and 11am). It’s why I always get my hair cut on a Tuesday (less jeopardy due to staff malaise), and why it’s best to eat out on a Tuesday. The chefs and the produce are at their freshest.
But what of cycling? Well, my article of the week is Robyn’s naughty-and-nice list rating every men’s WorldTour teams’ 2024 season, followed by Ewan’s way-too-early Tour de France Femmes 2025 predictions and then, in third and not technically a webstory but an ear-tale, it’s our very own Cyclist Magazine Podcast episode 117 featuring Fabian Cancellara. It’s a top listen if I do say so myself. He is Spartacus.
Now on with the In The Drops show…
Assos Equipe R Spring Fall jersey and bibshorts
There are three things you need to know about Assos: it costs a fortune; it’s full of proprietary fabrics; it’s some of the best performing cycling kit in the world. And its latest Equipe R Spring Fall kit is a case in point.
Top to bottom including socks and base layer (aka the ‘SS Skin Layer’ as favoured by all on the Enterprise), I’m wearing £498 of kit here.
Yep, £23 socks.
There is no escaping this fact. But the tech, the feel, the form and the function is undeniably brilliant. In the broadest of strokes this is cold weather kit made to ride hard or race in. It’s thermal, not waterproof per se, with a brushed fleece lining to the long sleeve jersey and bib shorts, and as the name suggests, this is for all the cold months except for deep winter.
The cut is racy – AEPD racingFit racy, says Assos, a sort of 3D mapped fit based on pro feedback. It’s a fit that feels wrong when stood up, but feels bespoke-level tailored when sat on a bike.
The shoulders and chest are a prime example – the shoulders feel loose and the chest tight when stood up, but sat on a bike and reaching forward, the shoulders become taut and the chest slackens off. Likewise the sleeves and bibshort legs. Too long you might think, until you sit on the bike, reach forward and pedal, then it all makes sense.
The Equipe R bib shorts are a change up from their predecessors, with thicker, warmer RX Extreme fabric on the thighs and hips but a single layer, lighter fabric around the crotch and core. Assos says this provides better thermoregulation. The S11 seatpad uses Assos’s ‘free-floating’ goldenGate 2.0 construction, where the seat pad moves independently of the shorts when pedalling, something that works brilliantly to eliminate chafing. Assos says its shape has been redesigned to better suit aggressive riding positions.
Up top, the Equipe jersey is a marvel of fabric mashups and more mad names. The chest, arms and shoulders are made from a mid-weight version of Assos’s RX thermal fabric. The front torso is OSMOS Medium, a breathable but insulative fabric for this wind-facing section of the body.
The back panel is Stabilizator V11, which is thinner and mesh-like since your back is out of the wind but operates like a heatsink when cycling. The collar is made from struzzoKragen (but of course), which Assos says helps regulate temperature without needing to unzip the zipper. Then there’s the zeroPressure Waist, soft and high stretch for comfort.
Tops and bottoms are water-repellent coated, plus the high-density weave does a turn at keeping out water. So not waterproof but good enough for showers, plus even when wetted out it’s still warm in a wetsuit kind of way.
The Equipe jersey is designed to be used with Assos’s Skin Layer P1 base layer (there are several thickness grades of Skin Layer). As you might imagine, said base layer is £85, but it integrates seamlessly in the sense that the two pieces feel like one medium-thick softshell jacket.
All in, the Equipe R kit is solving my perennial question this time of year: what should I wear? For these are days that start cold, sometimes stay cold, sometimes get hotter, sometimes rain, sometimes drizzle, sometimes plunge into biblical cats and frogs, are sometimes hard efforts, other times genteel get-the-miles in cruises.
All told, the Equipe R is proving (so far) a Goldilocks kit as we approach winter – it’s just right.
CHPT3 Transit 2.0 cycling shoes
‘The power of a pro cycling shoe, the comfort of a luxury sneaker,’ says David Millar’s apparel brand.
I’d instantly ascribe to the luxury sneaker bit – the look of the Transit 2.0s is very much in the mode of the sort of shoe you see on very expensive people, often worn with suit trousers and so luxurious looking as to appear completely nondescript. You wonder, as you peer through the Armani window, how much better this £400 pair of trainers from a non-sporting brand can be compared to trainers from Nike? But this isn’t Armani, this CHPT3, and Millar knows cycling.
The Transits have a recess in the sole to house two-bolt cleats, such that you can walk as if in normal shoes but can clip into SPD-type pedals (or Crank Bros, hybrid pedals or anything that has a two-bolt cleat) when riding your bike.
This isn’t ground-breaking, but compared to other commuter shoes I’ve tested over the years, the Transits genuinely do feel like trainers. You can run in them and they feel trainer-normal.
The key is that they flex in the forefoot, despite the solid pedal platform, and that they’re light – just under 400g a shoe (size 45), which is significantly lighter than most competitors. This is down to a full-length EVA foam sole whose low density is plush feeling, bouncy and light.
Crucial to the Transits’ cycling performance is what CHPT3 calls the Microplate, which is basically a stiff polymer insert sandwiched in the sole under the ball of the foot, to which cleats attach. It means that the shoe-pedal interaction feels efficiently stiff.
Other nice touches include measurement markings on the cleat area for accurate and repeatable fitting, a bolted on cover (pictured here it’s bolted on) to the recessed area so there’s no need for cutting out rubber inserts as per some shoes to fit cleats. Then if you want to roll back to non-cleats you just bolt the plates back on as opposed to walking around with sections of sole forever missing.
The uppers are leather with suede toes and understated detailing, which all calls back to the luxury side of things. But hey, this is a £200 shoe, it better be on the opulent side and not just the functional.
- Buy now from CHPT3 (£195)
SunGod Airas sunglasses
Winter might be coming but cycling knows no sunglass bounds – if anything, low glaring sun makes a good pair of sunnies even more essential in the colder months.
These Airas from market disruptors turned Ineos-sponsoring-mainstreamers, SunGod, feature 8KO lenses, which apparently are ‘as clear as the human eye’. I’d hope so too. They do look lovely to peer through, bringing a cool clarity to my vision in which edges of objects seem more vivid. Very useful if you’re riding fast looking out for potholes.
SunGod offers free repairs for life whether you break its sunglasses or they break themselves, albeit this doesn’t cover lens scratches. That’s on us, kids – how many times do I have to tell you to store your sunnies in their supplied bag!
Still, the screwless hinges, impact-resistant lenses and bendy frame leads to me think you’d need to run the Airas over to actually break them.
It’s also commendable to see that the Airas – and any SunGod product, says the brand – are ‘certified carbon neutral’. This comes from calculating the impact of making a pair in terms of power, production, transportation and disposal, and is certified independently. Lovely stuff.
- Buy now from SunGod (from £140)
Sa Calobra, Mallorca
I’ve just come back from a Cyclist trip to Mallorca (check out Cyclist magazine soon – subscribe here), and once again I’m blown away by the Sa Calobra climb, aka the Coll del Reis, aka the Ma-2141.
It starts at sea level and tops out at a mere 682m, but over its 9.5km the Sa Calobra is every bit one of the most stunning roads in the world.
Designed by a bloke called Antonio Parietti (very famous if you’re into that kind of thing) and finished in 1933, it’s utterly amazing to me the thing exists. It must have cost a fortune, it’s insanely technical in design, possessed of folly-level flourishes that make no civil engineering sense, and it’s all to connect the tiny port town of Sa Calobra with the rest of the island.
I’ve ridden this climb once before as part of a (sadly now mothballed) Sa Calobra closed road time-trial, almost 10 years ago to the day. My time then? 33min 51sec. My time now? 37min 51sec. And this time I was paced by local guide Owen, which is probably worth a couple of minutes in drag and encouragement. So ten years and some fag-packet maths (I even used to smoke back then, crazy) I reckon I’m 17% slower. Ageing. Bah.
Talking guides, we were hosted by local tour guiding outfit, Ciclos Major, and they were brilliant. So if you’re reading this, thanks so much Liz, Darryl and Owen. I can’t recommend Ciclos Major enough if you’re planning a visit to Mallorca, just like I can’t stress enough that you’ve never seen a road quite like the Sa Calobra. It is immense.
- Check out Ciclos Major for 2025 Mallorca trips
What we’re into this week: Cassette tape stupidity
I am a hipster tit. Strike that, I want to be hipster tit. Why else did I decide to resurrect my old Walkman (a Sony WM-EX672 in case you cared)?
Well first, because I found it in my drawer of random stuff, held it in my hand and my hand felt good.
Second, cos I looked it up on Ebay and these things are going for small fortunes.
Third, because I looked it up on audio forums and Reddit and this is apparently one of the last, best Walkmans Sony made, so it seems a shame to let it sit in a drawer, plus related to this fact is I am a cyclist so it is important to me that others know the stuff I have is the best stuff, ideally very tangible and analogue stuff, and that it is borne of a curious and informed and original intellect.
Anyway, turns out I have no tapes, so in my infinite wisdom this led to me buying an old tape deck for £60 off Ebay (a Denon DRM 595 in case you still care) and then recording my records onto tape, just like my dad used to do for me.
So far so great, until I put a tape in the Walkman and… nothing. Cue new batteries and charger. Still nothing. Cue rabbit hole dive into cassette tape forums and finding out how to replace the drive belt. Another £6.99 later and bingo! She’s back.
Is it worth it? Well so far it’s cost me the best part of £100 to get up and running (blank tapes are wildly expensive), and as one mate remarked, ‘That’s a complex way to enjoy low quality sound from a bulky device.’
I regret nothing. And recording Spotify onto tape is absolutely nothing like gluing down tube shifters to a Pinarello Dogma.
The post In The Drops: Goldilocks Assos kit, CHPT3 cycling trainers, SunGod sunglasses, Sa Calobra and cassette tapes appeared first on Cyclist.