Ideally I’d only have the shell but if I’m being honest I’m a bit wary of the riding at 03:00 and freezing so I’m trying to deal with the fear!
You’re only going to freeze if you stop. Otherwise the shell and whatever other minimal insulation you’re carrying should be plenty.
I scratched from a 500km audax-ish event in Summer in Scotland once for a similar fear when I got cold in a petrol station at 10pm, but that was because I knew my route wasn’t going to take me past (or even near) a single establishment that opened again before 7am and it was a self-supported event. That was a safety decision where if I had pushed on and then needed to stop for a mechanical or an injury or emergency sleep and couldn’t get warm again it could have been dangerous. If I were doing that again I’d bring my down jacket as an insurance policy for those eventualities, but there’s no way I would have needed to wear it while riding the bike.
That’s not the situation you’re in though - sounds like you’re never going to be that far from 24hr services and there will be a good number of other riders there plus maybe even some event support? Shell plus all your warmers etc. should be plenty to get you through anything you might need to deal with in the first 12 hours, and if things go really wrong you can always get yourself indoors somewhere for a bit. And you might even have an event team to lean on as one final extra layer of contingency.
(I did actually finish my event so ‘scratched’ is an exaggeration, just it was after I slept in a hotel for 4 hours and dropped off the leaderboard completely.)
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