BIKE JACKETS

A cycling jacket that can keep you warm, dry and cool at the same time? Rob Banino tries out 10 amazing, technicolour dreamcoats…

We assess the pockets, zips, comfort and breathability of 10 winter riding jackets

Abike jacket has to do a pretty complex job. It needs to keep out the cold without making you overheat and it should prevent rain from getting in but not stop sweat evaporating out. It’s a tricky proposition, even with the advent of today’s advanced fabrics. Suffice to say, coming up with a suitable solution means a jacket is as high-tech as any other item you use for cycling. Scratch beneath the surface and you quickly find yourself in a world of hydrophilic polyurethane coatings and ePTFE membranes with billions of micropores per square inch.

But why do they need to be so complex when all they’re doing is being a barrier between you and the elements? The answer to that is you, or more specifically, the heat and sweat you generate while riding. Cold and wet weather can not only make you miserable, it can affect your performance. But so can getting too hot and soaking in your own juices, which means a cycling jacket and the fabrics it’s made from have to work like an elaborate one-way system. They need to be porous and gas permeable from the inside out but non-porous and impermeable from the outside in.

And there are a number of ways of doing that, each of which has different implications for what the jacket costs and how comfortable it can keep you. This test will give you an idea of just how effective a selection of the current crop of winter cycling jackets can be. And whether they’re worth splashing out on.