Touratech Compañero World 2 Suit

Adventure Rider Issue #39

• It’s what we do
• Aussie Ron Does New Zealand
• Our Island Home
• Yamaha Ténére 700
• Northwest Or Bust
• Two In One
• Help Me If You Can
• Why, Brother? There’s Nothin’ Much There
• Touratech Compañero World 2 Suit
• 8 Blokes. 9244km. 1 Great Ride
• An Interesting Week In The Andes
• Taming Hills with Miles Davis
• Sole man with Andy Strapz
• Holding Hands with Karen Ramsay
• Fit Out – Touratech Yamaha XTZ 700 Ténéré
• Checkout

A premium riding suit can be a big investment.Touratech’s Compañero World 2 suit is about as premium as it gets.

The outer Goretex layer will prevent the wind getting to the rider’s skin.

A few issues back – issue #35 – we put a BMW Rallye suit to the test and found that, although the price looked scary, the protection and comfort offered were exceptional.

That set us to wondering about other top-shelf riding suits, and when you start ferreting around on the very topmost shelf, Touratech’s Compañero World 2 suit is a frontrunner.

Adventure Rider Magazine’s publisher has been wearing a Compañero suit for quite a while, and of course importer Robin Box is a big exponent of everything Touratech. He’s ridden some of the world’s harshest and most challenging environments.

Both these blokes swear by their Compañero suits.

Now Adventure Rider Magazine’s editor has joined the Compañero club as well.

The Boss chose the more subtle colour scheme, but is still happy to show it off when the chance arises.

Extremes

Clearly suits in this price range aren’t for everyone. The Compañero is aimed at riders who expect they’ll find themselves dealing with ‘four seasons’. In this context that means sub-zero cold and equally extreme heat. The suit also offers a very high level of impact and abrasion protection.

The four-seasons concept is important, and it’s where the price of apparel and survival gear climbs steeply. Do some research on the price of four-seasons sleeping bags versus lighter-weight sleeping bags to see what we mean.

Apparel is the same. To be truly rated as four-seasons gear means some expensive manufacture and materials. There’s no way around it.

Do you need a four-seasons suit?

That, really, is the definitive question riders should ask themselves when considering a purchase like a Compañero suit.

Robin Box explains it best: “If a rider can choose when to ride, they can avoid extreme weather conditions. Forecasts are accurate enough now that we never need to head into surprising weather.”

That makes sense. Riders who can say, “Yeah…nah. The weather’s a bit shit, I’ll stay indoors today,” will struggle to justify the cost of a four-seasons suit.

But for those who ride come hell or high water, and especially those who ride through terrain where the conditions are unknown and/or uncertain – in other words, hard-core adventure riders – the level of comfort and protection offered by apparel becomes far more important.

Robin has a good example.

“If you ride, say, Tasmania in the summer, you need to be prepared for extremes. We’ve had it happen three times now. We were exposed to 40 degrees getting there from the mainland, and three days later at Lake Sinclair we were pushing snow off our visors.”

That’s the type of scenario the Compañero is designed to deal with.

The ‘inner’ suit will be the choice for most everyday Aussie conditions. There are no vents. The whole suit breathes.

Big fan

Those keen for specs on the Compañero can log on to touratech.com.au. We’re just going to offer a few observations from our time using the gear.

Basically, the Compañero World 2 is in two parts. Both jacket and pants have an inner and outer, just as we saw with the BMW suit. The outer is a Cordura layer laminated to a Goretex layer. It’s abrasion resistant, windproof and waterproof, and it’s light and packs down to a very compact bundle.

The ‘inner’ is the jacket and pants we’d all wear all the time. The outer only goes on to deal with cold or wet.

One thing that struck us immediately with the Compañero was there being no vents in the main – inner – suit. Not one.

The whole suit, aside from the protective panels, is a mesh-like Cordura Air fabric, and we were surprised at how well it worked. One very interesting facet of that type of construction is, vents rely on moving air to have an effect. A rider sitting still, or shielded by a fairing and screen, won’t get much benefit from opening vents in a suit. A mesh-type construction allows air to move around the rider’s body all the time, even when stationary or when surrounding air is stationary.

That’s a significant consideration for riders of faired adventure bikes.

Adventure Rider Magazine’s publisher bought his Compañero suit about three years ago.

“Love it!” he exclaimed. “I wouldn’t change it.

“It’s great the way the breeze goes through the whole suit. It means less fatigue on those big, long days, so I reckon it’s a safety consideration as well.”

The inner suit has armour protecting joints and high-risk anatomical regions, and of course areas under the armour don’t get the airflow to the same extent.

But it’s refreshing the way so much of a rider’s body enjoys the air movement.

Hard up

The armour in the Compañero is worth a closer look.

SAS-TEC is a specialist body-armour supplier, and, like some of the other premium brands, it’s very pliable and soft in its normal state. When a rider pulls on the Compañero pants and jacket the armour pretty much forms itself to the rider’s shape –whether that’s the knee, elbow, back, hip or whatever. This naturally makes for a very high level of comfort.

The tricky bit is, any impact makes the SAS-TEC armour instantly go hard… so you can go home, not to hospital.

We don’t know how it works, but it works, and it’s easy to test or demon-strate. Just grab a SAS-TEC guard and squish it around a bit. Get a feel for how pliable it is. Then whack it on a table or concrete floor a couple of times and see how rigid it feels.

The difference is fairly amazing.

It’ll revert to its pliable self very soon after the impacts stop.

Like all good-quality equipment, SAS-TEC armour is not cheap, and it’s part of the Compañero World 2 suit.

Chilly and wet

When the temperature drops or it looks like rain, the outer gear can be slipped on over the top with little fuss or disruption.

We can pull the outer layers on without removing gloves or boots.

We saw the value of the Goretex outer layer on the cold ride in issue #37. While riders were shivering and suffering on a cold night in the NSW snowfields, Robin and The Boss pulled on their Goretex outers and sat patiently while everyone else struggled into every layer of every-thing they could lay their hands on.

The outer layer will prevent the wind getting to the rider’s skin, and we’ve covered the importance of that several times.

That doesn’t mean the rider won’t be cold. If the temperature’s low, the rider needs to consider layers and managing the low temperatures. The outer layer is a big step in the management process.

Does the World 2 suit keep the rider dry?

The editor decided a real test was in order, so when the opportunity presented itself he rode in the rain wearing the inner pants and inner and outer jacket. The result was, predictably, the bottom half being soaked and even leaking into his boots, but between neck and waste he stayed bone dry.

The ride was about 100km in light rain, but it was an excellent demonstration of how well the outer layer did its job.

Touratech’s Compañero World 2 suit is intended for riders facing extreme conditions. It’s a well-thought-out bit of kit, and with the outer Goretex liner in place will cope with serious cold and wet.

Fit as

One thing we particularly liked about the Touratech suit was the fit.

There’s a list of measurements Touratech asks for, but with just a couple of basic numbers and the regular sizes of other gear the Touratech Australia folks figured it out.

There’s heaps of adjustment available.

Thanks to clever design there seems to be plenty of room to add layers if needed, or snug everything down if a rider chooses to go without, say, a back protector or knee guards. We loved the way the cuffs of the jacket have both zips and velcro. That allows the cuff to be adjusted with the velcro, then left in that position. Removing the jacket and pulling on gloves only means pulling the zips undone or doing them up. The size of the cuff remains the same.

There are lots of little things that show up with use and underline just how much thought has gone into this gear.

Bottom line

The crusher is the price.

The Compañero World 2 suit you see on these pages retails at $3165.

As we said at the start, it’s not a purchase for casual riders.

But if you’re facing serious survival challenges and extreme temperatures and conditions, this is the standard of equipment you should be considering.