The defining feature of the Sheeva 10 is also its most obvious, a top layer of Titanal that runs virtually edge to edge underfoot and tapers to a central tongue that terminates halfway up the forebody and down towards the tail. The partial laminate of metal simultaneously serves two purposes: it magnifies torsional strength where it’s widest while allowing the rest of the ski to go with the flow. The tapered tip isn’t itching to dip into a turn and the tail isn’t the clinging type. This freedom to deflect helps the Sheeva 10 to drift over ratty terrain as if it were level.
The Sheeva 10’s ability to deliver the stability of a metal ski and the playfulness and ease of glass and carbon in a single package is recreated in a larger format, the Sheeva 11 (140/112/130). While in the Big Mountain world greater girth is sometime associated with greater ease, the metal underfoot in the Sheeva 11 “makes it ski way wider than a 112,” says Lauren Takayesu of Footloose, “but still easy to negotiate for the lady ripper.”
Big as he is, the Rustler 11 will always be the Bodacious’ little brother, and like many baby bros, the Rustler 11 tries hard to be his elder sibling’s antithesis. The biggest difference in the younger’s personality is how he behaves at the point of attack, where the ski meets the snow. Put simply, the Bodacious is a puncher, and the Rustler 11 is a counter-puncher.
Another way to characterize how the Rustler 11 differs from the Bodacious is the latter expects a little more from its pilot – more speed, more skill, more aggression – while the Rustler will happily accept you as you are, warts and all. That it surrenders some support on hardpack only matters if you want it to. Kept to the pow, it’s as easy as pie and a perennial recipient of a Silver Skier Selection.
Remember those inflatable punching bags made so kids can work out their juvenile aggressions? They had a round, weighted bottom that allowed Mr. Binky to take the most vicious blow and bound right back up, ready to roll with the next haymaker. That’s sort of how it feels to descend on the Blizzard Firebird WRC, a slippery yet solid foundation that seems impossible to fall off of.
The Firebird WRC is a beast of s GS ski that is easily tamed, as long as you meet a couple of prerequisites. First, stop asking it to turn at slow speeds, a total waste of its talents. The WRC solves this problem for you by continuing to accelerate until it feels inspired to take the top off its first turn at around 30mph. Second, keep it on trail. If you take it into soft snow it will burrow into it until it finds the bottom, where it will stay until you get a crane to extract it.
Third, don’t ski it passively. Presumably you’re contemplating a race ski because you already know how to drive one, so get after it, for therein lies the reward.
What distinguishes the Nordica Enforcer 100 from the other benchmark models in the All-Mountain West category isn’t its poplar/beech/balsa core nor its two sheets of .4mm Titanal; it’s the length and flex of its traditional camber line that instill it with power, precision and pop off the edge.
Most skis 100mm or more underfoot don’t have a lot of camber built into the baseline, so they’re easier to push around in soft snow. The Enforcer 100 isn’t drinking this Kool-Aid; it’s made for skiers who know how to stand on a ski and drive it. If you look at a pair base-to-base, you’ll notice that the while the tip and tail are amply rockered upward, they’re stubby in length, a shape Nordica aptly names Blunt Nose. The rest of the ski is arched considerably, assuring as long and secure an edge connection as you can find in a double-rockered baseline.
In its longer lengths, the Enforcer 100 is a strong skier’s salvation, able to respond forcefully to pressure. Jim Schaffner of Start Haus, a big man who skis with a racer’s innate aggression, hails the Enforcer 100 as “really, really fun and these conditions, which consist of 16 inches of slightly compact powder which is starting to get chopped up. Found this ski to be really versatile, moving smoothly from the chopped-up stuff into fresh pow. All in all, a very good ski for conditions today and I can see its versatility would extend to other conditions, as well.”
When Nordica introduced the original Enforcer five years ago, it already had a 100mm-underfoot model in its line, the NRGy 100, and the more acutely rockered Enforcer could have been misconstrued as redundant. Yet the Enforcer immediately earned a name for itself as a new breed of all-terrain ski that disguised a fully cambered baseline – and all the power it entails – between rockered extremities. As the Enforcer family grew, first wider, then skinnier, the arrival of an Enforcer 88 became inevitable.
Now that the long and winding road between the first Enforcer and the last has reached its destination, one can only wonder, what took them so long? This ski is a marvel, stable enough to navigate scoured wind crust yet ready to pounce turn to turn on hardpack with barely a transition between the two contrary conditions. Its score for short-radius turns is off the charts, yet it can lay into a big-bellied arc as comfortably as a cat curling up on a sofa.
