Bar tape is bar tape, right? Well, for those not well-versed in the world of curly bars, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Riders and mechanics can often be bordering on obsessive-compulsive with both the material of the wrap and how it’s wrapped — extra points if you don’t need to use any electrical tape.
Although we’re not experts on The Rules governing matching your bar tape to your saddle or how to use cork ribbon to skirt the UCI rules around the ‘puppy paws position,’ between our team we’ve spent our fair share of time wrapping the bars on our own personal gravel bikes. Guee tape has recently arrived in Australia and has an enormous range of tapes in a wide spectrum of colours and compounds.
Guee Sio Dura bar tape
When the Guee tape arrived, the comfortable, textured Sio Dura ribbon seemed like the way to go for some big gravel kilometres and long days on the bike. The tape is thick but surprisingly stretchy, allowing it to easily contort around the hoods and bar clamp. Interestingly, this tape isn’t supplied with any adhesive backing. This didn’t prove to be an issue as the tape gripped itself, and you weren’t constantly wrestling the backing paper out of the way as you wrapped. The other bonus of having no adhesive backing is that a few months down the line, if something has shifted or you need to change a cable housing, the tape won’t disintegrate as you unwrap it, leaving the glue stuck to the bars.
Once wrapped, the Sio Dura has a thick vibration-damping feel that we’re eager to test out. The textured surface and rubbery compound will also be interesting to trial, particularly in the wet or with sweaty hands.
Guee Super Light bar tape
The patterned blue Super Light tape seemed like a good fit for Jono’s Open U.P. gravel bike. Weighing about half as much as the Sio Dura tape, the Super Light tape is a bit thinner and quite a bit less stretchy. With that, we expect it will make for a more direct feel through the bars.
Both tapes came with expander bar end plugs, that have a little Guee logo cap that pops into them. These are far superior to the press-in style bar ends as it’s not a fight to get them in, only for the sneaky thing to disappear the first time you lay your bike down on the ground — intentional or not.
To accompany their bar tapes, Guee also makes an SL Barpad to add more padding underneath your tape. The padding has a little ledge built into it to create a wider platform for your palms.
Alongside their range of tapes, Guee also manufactures some mega-lightweight grips and some nifty bottle cages. We’ve got the Vivi silicone grips ready to be fitted to an upcoming test bike, as well as the Qing+ bottle cages. Despite having a strange name, the Qing+ cages provide a unique solution by mounting a tyre lever in the base of the cage for emergencies.
We’ll be putting some more time on the bar tape, cages and grips from Guee in the coming months to see how they perform!
