The 2008 pressure suit comes in near the top of the tree of body protection from 661, second only to the Pro pressure suit.
It features hardshell protection for forearms and elbows, a cup over your deltoids, a removable hard breast plate and an articulated spine cover. All of this runs over a layer of perforated foam increasing to a couple of layers on the back. If you run the breast plate, that means you have two layers of foam and a plastic sheet to protect you.
All this adds up to a solid-feeling set of pads. Size-wise our ‘large’ came up pretty big and all the additional padding meant it was quite a weighty bit of kit. In use we ditched the breast plate almost immediately – it seemed to stick out a mile and felt goofy, and we’ve yet to need that much protection for our sternum in our biking careers.
The back protection was in danger of being dumped as well – we wondered if it was a little too wide and not quite flexible enough, but it ended up being less intrusive than we had feared. It still feels a bit odd if you arch your back, or even stand up straight, but it never actually stopped us from doing anything.