OVERVIEW
When Laurent Boix-Vives acquired the distressed fledgling brand Dynastar, he already had Rossignol in his portfolio. Thus was born a sibling rivalry that persists to this day, with the elder trying to establish an untouchable record and the younger always looking for a way to upstage the first-born.
While we can’t say for certain that the Cham series Dynastar launched in 2013 was a conscious effort to outperform Rossi’s successful S7 model, it’s a plausible assertion. Dynastar’s powder skis had always been beefier than whatever Rossi had in play; consider the Jeremy Nobis signature Dynastars versus Rossignol’s Bandit XXX, for example. Heavily rockered, the S7 skied shorter than it measured and without any metal in it was kind of a noodle.
Retaining the idea of the shorter effective platform, Dynastar gave the Cham a stiff front rocker that was segregated from the main structure of the ski by moving the widest contact point well down the ski. Then they tucked the last several cm’s of tail in so they also wouldn’t interfere with turn radius. Finally, they turned up the torsional rigidity so the ski could handle higher speeds. The result was a whole line of S7’s on steroids, christened the Chamonix series in honor of the resort just down the road from Sallanches, where Dynastars are still made.
With an appetite for hugging the fall line, the Cham 97 and Cham 107 developed a strong – literally and figuratively – following in their debut season, but they came across as a bit too aggressive for the weekend warrior. Overlooked in the excitement over the powerful Cham series headliners were their metal-free doppelgängers, the High Mountain versions meant for true alpinists. The Cham High Mountain 107 in particular proved a better choice for those who ski less than 50 days a season and mean to use it primarily as a powder ski. By “better,” we mean you won’t have to work as hard, which is the main rationale for skis this wide in the first place.
In 2015, Dynastar began the transition to a metal-free Cham collection when it modified the Cham 117 to make this monstrous ski more maneuverable. The new design, dubbed Cham 2.0, lessened the severity of the front rocker and smoothed out the transition zones in the 5-point sidecut. The following year the entire Cham line was given the 2.0 treatment, so all the Chams are now mellower and easier to ski for those who don’t attack straight down the fall line.
The 2017 Season
Dynastar shook up their Cham and women’s collections last season; in 2017, the innovation spotlight shifts to its Technical skis, Speed Zone for men and Intense for women. The sexy new signature technology that gives the Speed Zone and Intense models their stellar grip is called Powerdrive, a 3-piece vertical sidewall comprised of Titanal, a viscoelastic strip and ABS directly over the edge. The idea is to give the edge its own suspension system so it follows terrain without ever losing edge grip.
Our test crew was able to validate Powerdrive’s effectiveness as plenty of testers took a spin on the Speed Zone 12 Ti. We were looking forward to filing a parallel report on at least one of the Intense series, but alas, none of our lasses latched onto any, an omission we’d dearly like to redress this season.