What new women’s ski this year was a unisex ski last year? Answer: the three smallest sizes of the Kore 93. As has been observed on these pages before, the construction requirements of an off-trail ski and a women’s ski are virtually identical. Having already created an immaculate lightweight construction, all that remained to make its highly acclaimed Kore 93 a women’s ski was to move the mounting position two cm’s ahead and add a W to its name.
By anointing the Kore 93 with a “W,” Head felt it could part ways with the Wild Joy and Great Joy. Let us pause a moment to mourn the passing of two pioneering women’s skis. The Wild Joy was remarkably supportive for its weight, an identity crisis that may have hurt its ability to attract a larger following. The Great Joy should have been the star of the original Joy series, but it’s hard to make a 98mm-waisted ski the centerpiece of a women’s collection. When we look back at this era, the Great Joy will be remembered as one greatest made-from-scratch women’s skis of all time.
Many lifelong skiers are familiar with the decidedly mixed history of lightweight skis. Anyone who wants to re-visit the dubious joys of a stripped-down ski can always hop on a $399 package ski. Suffice it to say, you’ll learn quickly to keep your speed in check.
So I suspect most veteran testers who try a Head Kore model for the first time carry with them a hint of suspicion. You can tell in the hand that they’re lighter than the typical wood-and-metal make-up usually found at the top of this popular genre. Will a noticeably lighter ski like the Kore 99 measure up to the standard set by powerful skis like the Bonafide, MX99, M5 Mantra and Enforcer 100?
Yes, indeed. The Kore 99 annihilates every negative ever associated with lightweight skis. Lightness doesn’t’ affect its grip or stability, which is nearly on a par with the metal-laden i.Rally. It holds a medium-radius turn without a hitch, delivering effortless power usually associated with a more traditionally built ski.
For the Kore 99 is anything but traditional and a significant departure from Head’s customary wood and metal constructions. The Kore’s principal components are Graphene, Koroyd and Karuba, a lightweight wood often found in backcountry models. The Graphene does the heavy lifting in terms of distributing pressure along a flex pattern that provides the feedback experts expect from a high performance ski.
Head wasn’t the first ski manufacturer to market a carving ski, but it was the first major brand to not only embrace the Carving concept but to adopt it as the cohering principle behind every ski it made. This primordial dedication to the art of creating a continuous track has reached its purest expression in Head’s Supershape series, where the i.Titan is the widest (80mm waist) among peers.
Despite its relatively broad beam, the i.Titan feels as quick to the edge as any 75mm stick on the slopes. It feels more agile than it measures for three main reasons. First, there’s its shape, with a 57mm drop between the tip and the waist, so as soon as it’s tipped, it’s carving on a multi-radius, continuous edge. Second, its front rocker is so shallow it does nothing to inhibit early turn entry. And third, the piezos in its tail stiffen up the rearbody when subjected to vibrations that racing across hard snow engenders.
My favorite story about how Head engineers went about optimizing Graphene – carbon in its most elemental form, a matrix of the hexagonal atom a mere one atom thick, or deep, or wide or however you want to measure something so infinitesimal – in their Supershape series of carving skis. Having already made a collection of women’s skis from scratch using the new material, the Head R&D team knew they could use Graphene to tinker with flex distribution with minimal effect on mass distribution. The logical thing to do, particularly as skis like the i.Rally weren’t famous for being light, was to trim down the core and thin out the metal laminates to make a more accessible carver for the masses.
So what did Head do? Just the opposite: it thickened the i.Rally’s top and bottom sheets of Titanal and widened them all the way to the edge, then built up the core profile for good measure. I remind you that the i.Rally Head enhanced was already the de facto standard setter in the genre, not some weak reed in dire need of a power boost. Like all the Supershapes, the i.Rally already had piezos in its tail section that when vibrated produce an electric pulse used to power a microchip which in turn tells the ski’s tail feathers to stiffen up. Point being, the i.Rally was a wickedly powerful machine before its most recent upgrades; the 19/20 edition generates enough power to illuminate the Vegas Strip.
Last year we anointed the Head Kore 93 as our All-Mountain East Ski of the Year, a title it richly deserved. In the Era of Lighter is Better, almost all mainstream brands have sought a variety of ways to strip away any excess fat in their designs. When Head acquired a license to use Graphene in sporting equipment, the Austrian brand possessed a material advantage in the race to make the lightest ski that didn’t suck.
The reason the market hasn’t been awash in lightweight skis for years is because mass is part of what makes a ski damp, or able to absorb vibration. Lighter weight formulae have been tried for decades, always with the lamentable downside that they couldn’t hold an edge any better than Florence Foster Jenkins could hold a note. Head spent several years working with Graphene before it applied the superlight material – carbon in a matrix one-atom thick – to its previously woeful collection of fat skis.
And lo and behold, it turned out that Head finally, as it trumpets in its slogan, got light right. Wisely, it didn’t try to make the lightest ski possible with its miracle matrix, or the Kore 93 wouldn’t stand up to the rigors of battering through set-up crud fields. But the Kore 93 is nonetheless noticeably lighter than 80% of its peers, which contributes to its elite Finesse score.
