There are few more game-changing pieces of kit – in my lifetime at least – than the Castelli Gabba, one so good at what it does that its release in 2011 saw non-Castelli-sponsored pros buying their own and Sharpie-ing out the logo. It was, and still is, a tremendous piece of kit. Six generations on and this is the most radically different Gabba yet: the Gabba R.
The headline here is speed. The old Gabba was developed for the Cervélo Test Team as a faster alternative to the traditional flappy rain jackets, but with the Gabba R Castelli claims to have pushed that envelope to a new level.
In a Castelli-authored white paper detailing wind-tunnel and real-world tests, the Gabba R is said to be around 2-3% faster than its predecessor, the Gabba RoS, 3-5% faster than a traditional rain jacket and 1% faster than the Castelli Sanremo BTW – notable given the Sanremo is a purpose-built speedsuit (NB this is in a regular road riding position, in an aero tuck the Sanremo is 1% faster than the Gabba R).
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Key is a new material from Italian fabric specialist ITTTAI, specifically the shiny, silvery parts of the Gabba, which Castelli says ‘combines stretch-fit functionality with unparalleled water resistance and breathability’. In other words, Castelli has been able to make a faster Gabba because it has found an acceptably weather-resistant fabric that’s more stretchy than the Gore-Tex fabrics of Gabbas past.
As such, the Gabba R has a skin-tight fit and a waterproof rating of 5,000mm. For context, classic waterproof Gore-Tex is rated at 28,000mm and the number refers to the height a column of water can be when stood on a given material before water leaks through.
As a rule of thumb, anything over 20,000mm is what you might call ‘properly waterproof’, 10,000-20,000mm will cope with light rain and less than 10,000mm is for showers or drizzle. That makes the Gabba’s 5,000mm water-resistant not waterproof, but to my mind that’s no problem – the Gabba’s deliberate trade-off has forever been to keep riders warm as opposed to dry. Like a wetsuit, getting wet is fine so long as you don’t get cold. Yet it’s because of this that the Gabba R and I start to part ways.
Castelli Gabba R: Cold realisations
The Gabba R is impressively waterproof given its low rating, water beading up gratifyingly on its surface, and it’s much more packable than before, squashing down into a ball the size of an orange. But it’s not warm. Its material is very thin, a few steps up from regular Lycra, albeit with large parts – the silvery parts – coated in a kind of waterproofing rubber, or as Castelli puts it, ‘electro-spun hydrophilic polyurethane’ (this is a process where jets of liquid polymer are sprayed onto a fabric). Its skin-tight fit makes it aero, but doesn’t leave much room for air or moisture to be trapped and warm into an insulating layer.
Feelings of warm or cold are personal and are both temperature and intensity-dependent, but for context my recent riding has been sub 10°C and I found I needed to wear a substantial long-sleeve base layer underneath unless I was going really hard. Decent hills on a cold day and the Gabba R was fine, but going for a moderate spin left me feeling the chill.
This is something I haven’t come across with older Gabbas, where a short-sleeve base layer would do, but herein lies the rub: Castelli has made the Gabba R for a much more ‘pro’ kind of rider than before, and I’m just not that rider.
That rider races and he or she stays warm because they ride hard. They aren’t really worried about getting uncomfortable on the bike within reason, because they’re not paid to be comfortable. But they are worried about how fast they go, at all times. And as a side note, they are also really trim in the cyclist mode – I’m normally a medium, I sized up to a large and I still had that feeling of being ‘poured in’ to the Gabba R.
Given this, in one sense I can’t knock the Gabba R, but in another I think it’s a shame that its design so unashamedly ostracises a certain type of rider, the type I think most of us actually are and which older Gabbas served so well.
Of course, you can still buy the older Gabba RoS (warmer, less aero), so seen as a special spin-off racing jacket, the Gabba R is very good indeed. So maybe that’s how I’ll leave it: the Gabba R is brilliant at serving its rarefied audience, but as for me, I’ll stick to my old Gabba, thanks. It’s exceptional too.
Castelli Gabba R: spec
- Price: £340
- Weight: 186g (large)
- Colours: Silvery grey
- Sizes: S, M, L, XL, 2XL
- Contact: saddleback.co.uk
