No single ski benefited more from the addition of the Carbon Alloy Matrix (designated by the HD suffix in the product nomenclature), than the Experience 88 HD. There’s nothing about this ski it didn’t make better. It grips hard snow with more tenacity. It deflects clumps of day-old crud with more contempt. It tosses aside the occasional deflection that occurs in the belly of a 40mph GS turn, something the Olds 88 – excuse us, the old E88 – didn’t have the stuffing to resist.
Pay attention, Dear Reader, for this is one of the more significant shifts in product behavior we’ve seen in the last several years. The previous E88 had limits that might not have been perceptible to all Finesse skiers, but the 2017’s Experience 88 HD has moved the boundary over the Power skier’s horizon.
It’s a natural impulse to compare any ski to the model that immediately preceded it in the same family, so the arrival of Rossignol new Famous 10 invites one to contrast it with the Unique 10 that came before.
The two skis are surprisingly quite different. The Famous 10 has considerably deepened its sidecut to accentuate carving action and short-turn facility. The new ski’s construction trades the Unique 10’s Air Core for an all-Paulownia core supporting the same Sandwich Duracap design used in the men’s Pursuit series.
The Enforcer’s on edge authority derives from a no nonsense construction – all wood core filling in a metal sandwich – applied to a cambered baseline. It’s the shape of this baseline that’s the Enforcer’s special sauce: the forward contact point is pulled back 25% from the tip and the rear contact retreats 5% along the tail. While the rockered areas are pronounced, they are relatively low-angle so that any act of tipping and pressuring is sufficient to put the extremities back in snow contact. A blunt, low-profile “Hammerhead” shovel design keeps the tip closer to the surface, thereby reducing tip flap on hard snow.
The new Enforcer 93 is a spin-off of the widely lauded Enforcer 100, with whom it shares an appetite for all recipes for crud. One look at it’s amply rockered baseline tells you that no matter how well it performs on prepared slopes, it’s personality is definitely inclined to travel off-trail where the broken, irregular terrain actually has a calming effect
Like many skis with two sheets of Titanal in its guts, the Enforcer 93 likes to have some wind in its sails before its helmsman tries to maneuver. Once rolling, it’s relatively short contact area makes it feel quicker edge to edge than expected from a ride with a fairly portly 93mm waist.
