Arundel Art Gecko Bar Tape

Arundel Art Gecko bar tape is very grippy without the stickiness and propensity to pick up dirt like some rivals, but it's a pig to wrap neatly.

• Pros: Grippy in wet and dry whether gloved or bare-handed, comfortable, hardwearing
• Cons: Expensive, hard to wrap neatly

Arundel Bicycle is from Fort Worth rather than West Sussex, although it does use the English castle in its logo. It makes some cool stuff, like the carbon bottle cages David tested recently, and positions itself more at the hip, handmade end of cycling than the racing one.

> Buy this online here

The laid-back attitude is all over the Art Gecko bar tape's box: tongue-in-cheek instructions on the back advise you to 'Continue wrapping until you run into the stem, unwrap some tape because you went too far, slap the enclosed 'finishing tape' on your toolbox, chainstay, bumper etc, find some nice electrical tape and use it to hold the barwrap in place'.

But underneath the jokes is some seriously good bar tape. This is Arundel's flagship wrap and you can choose between nine shades of tri-colour tessellation, all of which start on the drops and fade to black below the hoods.

Lizard Skins, Supacaz and Joystick have all gone with very squidgy, aggressively sticky bar tape that could be made from recycled finger monsters. Arundel's is much firmer yet still very grippy to the touch – you can't tell this from the photos.

The printed patterned section on the drops doesn't have any stickiness at all, though, so if you were using Art Gecko on a race bike you'd need to watch out for that when you're sprinting in the drops.

Art Gecko doesn't have the same level of cushioning as its three main rivals, but for rougher riding Arundel does offer a cobble-specific Gecko Pavé that has a layer of foam under the layer of silicone. Art Gecko comprises of a single, fairly thick layer of polyurethane rubber with a top layer of very thin fabric.

The firmness and relative thickness of the tape make it challenging to wrap evenly. Because it has very little stretch, it had to overlap closely at the bends or I was ending up with folds that bulge. And unless you keep it highly tensioned all the time you can get bagging at the upper edges. I just couldn't get a decent double wrap around the hood without bagginess and/or folding so went with a single pass and left a bit of glue strip behind that hopefully isn't too obvious. I did also discover that it's a one-use-only tape because it starts to pull the surface fabric off itself if you leave it too long and then unwrap it. Maybe a pro mechanic would whip it on perfectly first time without having to go back, but the hobbyist bar tape wrapper could struggle.

The plugs are basic plastic rather than the superior aluminium expanding type that you get with Supacaz and Joystick and, as Arundel itself admits, electrical tape is better than the short, thin strip of finishing tape it supplies (I have used it in the photos to demonstrate this). At £34 there must be a bit of spare budget to upgrade these. If the plugs had a wider flange, as the expander models tend to, this might have solved the problem of getting the thick and unmalleable ends of the tape to disappear neatly into the bar ends.

Performance

The ride of the Art Gecko bar tape is just fabulous. It replaced Joystick Analog on my bike which, although easy to wrap, felt slightly distracting with bare hands because of the rubbery raised pattern of zig-zags and logos. I prefer the smooth but grippy Arundel for its ride feel as well as its aesthetic.

In the wet the top fabric layer tends to hold onto water more than its rubberier rivals and the grip is not at the same level as in the dry – also the case for Lizard Skins, Supacaz and Joystick, though they shed the water quicker – but it never becomes slippery.

> Read more road.cc reviews of bar tape here

Durability is looking good so far, and apart from the small sections where I had to go back for another go, it's staying in perfect nick.

Value

Arundel Art Gecko is priced to go head to head with the most expensive bar tapes. Supacaz Super Sticky Kush goes for £34.99 but that has a lot of pros riding it to back up the high price, plus better plugs and finishing strips. Lizard Skins DSP version 2 is £34 and also has an expander plug, while Joystick Analog has an RRP of £31.99 and also better finishing hardware.

Verdict

Classy, grippy bar tape that performs really well, but you need to be pretty handy at wrapping to get it looking perfect