By RaiseMagazine | January 10, 2012 at 8:37 am | No comments | TRAINING & EQUIPMENT

Sore, numb hands are a common complaint from riders on our challenges – and there are a number of things that can help, including regular changes of position for your hands on the bars and the purchase of snug fitting gel padded gloves.

However, often overlooked is the bar tape you choose. Here at Ride2Raise we’ve tested a few and it’s pretty much unanimous among our Ride Mangers that for longer, endurance rides, our favourite without a shadow of a doubt is the Lizard Skins DSP bar tape.

There are two types of DSP bar tape, a 1.8mm thickness Race tape, which we haven’t tested, and the standard 2.5mm DSP bar tape which is reviewed here.

The DSP stands for DuraSoft Polymer and it’s this spongy material that makes the tape so grippy, comfortable and shock absorbent. Despite this, it still only weighs 56g including plugs (2.5mm thickness).

The tape is easy to fit, with plenty of length on the supplied rolls, so there’s no need to over stretch the tape while fitting, and you can afford to be generous around the levers. While fitting you start to get a feel for how comfortable this tape is going to be. The pack comes with finishing tape and bar plugs as you would expect and we like that it’s available in a wide range of colours – from a sedate black to an eye-popping pink, lime green or orange – as we’re big fans of colour co-ordination here!

In use the tape has a reassuring grippiness, especially noticeable in wet conditions where they really excel against any other tape we’ve tested. It does an excellent job of absorbing shocks on uneven road surfaces and numb fingers, which can be caused by handlebar ‘buzz’, are much less likely to be a problem.

Some riders find that issues such as these only become apparent once they are on one of our challenges, as they may not have done the same kind of continuous mileage in their regular riding routine. 75 miles into a 250 mile bike ride is not a good time to find out you’re going to have numb fingers the rest of the way, so we think it’s well worth considering fitting this tape before taking part in any kind of endurance ride.

We’ve done thousands of miles using this tape and have found it to be extremely durable, and also easy to clean – particularly important on the brighter colours.

The tape is not to everyone’s taste. It has a slightly ‘artificial’ look and some people won’t like the soft, slightly ‘squidgy’ feel. However the main drawback is it’s jaw-dropping RRP of £25 per set. Shop around though, as there are offers out there.

In our opinion it’s well worth the cost. For long distance rides we think Lizard Skins DSP is the best bar tape you can buy.

And we’ve seen it used succesfully in other ways too…