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.
Unless you were on the moon last year, you know the M5 Mantra and its Titanal Frame design had a wildly successful debut. What’s all this Mantra mention got to do with the new Kendo 88? The new kid has finally stepped out of its sibling’s shadow. In the most hotly contested category, All-Mountain East, that’s loaded with star products, the Kendo 88 earned the highest score for every Power attribute as well as for Finesse/Power balance, the catchall criterion for overall excellence.
The single most important quality an all-mountain ski can possess is total indifference to terrain selection. On this score, the Kendo 88 has no peer. It transitions from wind-affected crud to crisp corduroy as if those two conditions were the same. On hard snow, it’s so quick to the edge the skier can’t even tell it’s rockered and it’s so stable in crud you can relax, drop the reins and let the boys run.
Jim Schaffner of Start Haus knew the new Kendo 88 was a winner from the first turn. “Let me begin by saying, this ski is going to end up being a category killer. A very well-balanced ski, easy to stay centered on and get pressure to the tip. A quick, lively ski that really held in the turn.”
When the Völkl M5 Mantra appeared last season, it was received like an answered prayer by thousands of Mantra fans who didn’t much care for the iteration that preceded it. The attributes that had been erased over time – and that the M5 Mantra restored – were a tighter waist for more accurate hard-snow steering and conventional camber underfoot, for greater grip and control over trajectory.
Völkl didn’t just resurrect an old Mantra concept; it created an entirely new recipe using the same classic components – wood, fiberglass and Titanal – that had helped put the original Mantra on the map. The new configuration is called Titanal Frame, for the difference maker is in how the top sheet of Titanal has been re-imagined.
Instead of a solid, end –to-end laminate, Völkl broke the topsheet into three pieces: a .6mm thick section in the forebody that runs around the perimeter and over the tip; a similar .6mm U-shaped part in the tail; and an independent .4 mm plate in the middle. By making it easier to bow underfoot, the skier can more readily compress the fat sheet of fiberglass right below the metal bits, loading the ski with energy and delivering another element Mantra fans had been missing: rebound.
