Castelli Body Paint bib short

Thor Hushovd and co on the Garmin-Cervlo team are currently wearing Castelli's Body Paint bib shorts in the Tour de France, so I was expecting them to be nothing short of superb on test. And they are. These Body Paint shorts really do deliver, in all aspects of their design and function. Enough to justify that eye-watering price tag? Well...

Let's look at the design brief for these shorts. Castelli's grand plan was to make a short that 'practically disappears' when worn. So, everything in the Body Paint short is designed to be as unintrusive as possible. The minimum number of seams, the simplest and most functional construction. To that end, the short part of the Body Paint bibs is a single piece of lycra, with only the bare minimum number of seams necessary to make the shape. The grippers in the legs are woven into the lycra, and the bibs are lycra straps too, a single piece with no seams.

Inside the Body Paints you'll find Castelli's Progetto X2 seatpad. This is a two-layer pad with a stretchy cover and padding layer beneath. The two sections are free to move over one another so nothing rubs; it's the same basic theory as those two-layer walking socks you get.

Put this all together and what do you get? £180 worth of bib shorts is what. How much? You could buy a bike for that, etc and so on. Let's gloss over that for a sec and get back to whether they're any good. Are they any good? Yes, they're quite brilliant. They really are. They're the best shorts I've yet tried, I think.

I've done the Fred Whitton in them, in the pouring rain. I've done a 16-hour, 350km all-dayer in them, and many other shorter rides. And they're just great. They're barely there, they never need to be adjusted, the pad is fantastic and the two-layer system works like a dream. It's hard to see how they could be better, really. You simply don't ever think about them when you're riding, which is exactly what you want.

So to value. Are they worth the money? As with anything top-end, it's the law of diminishing returns. Are they twice as good as the best £90 shorts you can buy? No. But they are among the best shorts you can buy. To be honest If you're paying the best part of two hundred quid for some shorts you'd expect nothing less than the best, and you won't be disappointed here.

Say you've spent three grand on a road bike and another thousand quid on a trip to the Marmotte or the Étape: do you want your ride to end in tears just because your cheap shorts have rubbed you raw? And it has to be said in comparison to Assos bibs these are mid-range in terms of price -the Assos FI.13 S5 bibs will set you back £225.99. So it's horses for courses, there's always a place for top-end kit and the technology trickle down might mean we can all have a pair for a hundred quid in a couple of years, who knows. What I do know is that Castelli aren't getting them back. Not that they'd want them now, mind.

Verdict

Technically brilliant bib shorts with an eye-watering price tag… although you could pay more