Tester: Ingrid Backstrom
The first time I got on the Blaze 106 W, the off-piste conditions were borderline horrible (and I have low standards). I ventured slowly off the rock-hard, icy piste, expecting maximum teeth-shaking chatter. Instead, the Blazes held an edge. I could feel the hard ridges of frozen snow beneath the skis, but the edges were biting, and the skis felt soft enough. I could make hoppy, GS-style turns, and I loved how the Blazes made it almost effortless for me to finish the turn right under my foot, propelling me into the next turn.
On icy groomers, I could hold an edge and go for bigger turns without chatter. I was blown away by the playfulness in this softer ski. The Blaze 106 made fun skiing instantly accessible to me on tricky snow after many months of not skiing.
When I skied them for the first time in powder, they felt as light and nimble as they had been on the hard snow, while their shape and width gave them the perfect float. I was giggling with how playful they felt, and how much control I had with such minimal effort. When the sun came out and the snow got heavier, I could find my stable center position and power through the crud with a bit wider stance, the skis doing the work for me and enabling me to ski until the lifts closed—my favorite type of ski day.
Why do I bother to round up every Non-FIS Race model I can rustle, along with the talent required to rate them? Practically no one in America could give a damn about the category, much less what I have to say about it. In the modern world, there are myriad definitions of what constitutes an all-purpose ski, and not one of them fits the profile of a NFR model. Quite the opposite, in fact: race skis are used as the prime example of what an all-terrain ski isn’t.
The world has indeed gone mad. In the halcyon days of my youth, the best all-terrain skis were race skis because all the best skis were race skis. A lot has happened to race skis since I was wearing long thongs, but one thing hasn’t changed: the best of them are still miraculous all-terrain tools. The best of them, exemplified by the Völkl Racetiger SL, feel limitless.
Corty Lawrence, whose normal turn radius is on the long side, called the Racetiger SL “the most versatile of the genre, with a broad range of uses. It has a traditional Teutonic feel and demeanor, and alters turn shape/radius without a problem. Good at low speed and great at high speed,” said the son of skiing legend Andrea Mead Lawrence.
GS race skis rule the open slopes, and they do so mercilessly, running as hot as they can. They oblige the skier to see things their way, rather than submit to some half-ass effort at arcing. They don’t show much interest in deviating from the fall line until they reach Mach One, and even then they don’t bow into fat, round arcs but barely deflect off their beeline course.
Like many gross generalities, the statements above don’t pertain to every member of the GS family. True, several non-FIS GS skis behave like über-specialists that only respond to well-trained technique, but Völkl got the memo that GS skis ought to be generalists, not specialists. The Racetiger GS can tuck into almost any shape of turn, grab it by the throat and ping off the edge with the energy normally associated with a slalom ski. Far from being finicky, it earned the best aggregate Finesse score among all the GS entries in the genre.
