Outside of the racing domain, where the product development machinery never stops churning, Nordica took a well-deserved sabbatical from new model creation for this season. Nordica can afford to rest on its lush laurels because it has knit together a tight line with no holes in it. The Enforcer models are so successful they’ve become a franchise unto themselves. The GT84 Ti and GT80 Ti prove the brand is still a leader in the Frontside carver category and its trio of Navigators provides perhaps the best cost/value relationship in the U.S. market.
The only issue we’ve ever had with Nordica women’s models is we can’t collect enough data to cover them all. If we could glean even a few more test scores from our panel, we’d be lauding the performance of the Sentra SL7 Ti, Astral 84 and Santa Ana 110, all likely leaders in their genres. We know we’d love them because our testers already recommend their sisters, the Astral 88, Santa Ana 93 and 100.
You’d never know it (as it doesn’t appear in our results), but we tried to get a handle on Nordica’s latest Non-FIS Race GS model, the Dobermann GSR. Corty Lawrence and I skied it in two iterations, the GSM with a piston plate, and the GSR with a different, only slightly less imposing plate. We spent so many runs trying to decide if we could feel any difference between the set-ups that we recorded only our impressions, sans scores. Our exhaustively unscientific conclusions were the two skis behaved exactly the same in the soft snow we had at our disposal. They were both balls-to-the-wall chargers, or as Corty more decorously put it, “bring your big-boy pants. Amateurs need not apply.”