Anything Fox that’s called ‘Fire’ means it’s apparel for chillier conditions; these aren’t full-on winter boxing gloves.
- Brand: Fox
- Product: Women’s Ranger Fire Lunar glove
- Price: £34.99
- From: Fox Racing
- Tested by: Hannah for 6 months
Pros
- Warm
- Thin, with good lever feel
- Good grip
Cons
- Sweaty
- Tight wrists
- Not warm enough in deep winter
Our rating
These gloves are windproof and splashproof with a slightly fuzzy and warm lining. They’re not thick and insulated like deep winter gloves, and cruising at freezing temperatures you’ll feel the chill. That is until you start pedalling and generating heat.
In cool temperatures and riding at tempo (or just up a big hill) these are great. They’re thin enough for you to retain good lever feel, and the cuffs reach far enough up your wrists to give an overlap with jacket sleeves. The silicone grippers on the first two fingers and the thumb are usefully broad and have stayed put through months of wearing and washing. This seems like a much better solution than thin stripes which quickly wear off.
In common with pretty much all gloves, I have little luck in getting the supposedly touch screen compatible fingertips to function. The snot wipe on the thumb is Ok, but a little too synthetic – I’d like something that was slightly more absorbent so it held on to whatever you’re trying to wipe off, instead of smearing it over your face.
They’re not waterproof, but they do put up a bit of a fight in the face of a few raindrops. Once the rain gets heavier, the fabric is thin enough that the gloves don’t feel heavy, so providing you keep generating plenty of heat by pedalling you can stay pretty warm.
If you run warm and sweaty hands you may well find these gloves too warm at all but the coldest temperatures. They’re really not very breathable, so once you start to sweat they become quite clammy and unpleasant, making them best saved for those cold and crisp days (or chilly mornings). The long cuffs help to keep you warmer still, by keeping those exposed veins in your wrists under cover, as well as keeping draughts out. The cuffs are quite tight though, and especially once wet they can be a little tricky to get on.
On the flip side, these gloves aren’t heavily insulated – just lightly fleecy on the inside. At cruising pace at sub-zero temperatures, I find my hands struggling to warm up. A good hill climb can fix that, but my usual commute doesn’t have one until the end of my ride home, meaning these aren’t the gloves I reach for in the morning if there’s snow in the air or a deep freeze.
Overall
I can forgive these gloves their fairly narrow window of goldilocks temperatures, because the reality is that above freezing but below 9°C is a pretty common state of affairs for a whole chunk of the year in the UK. And now is the time they will be in the sales, hence this review. I’ve retired them for these summer months, but full expect to be wearing them again come cooler autumn starts, and endless grey wintery days.
