It may seem odd for a modern brand to have two full lines of carving skis in its collection, but Head lives in carving country, central Europe, where linked, dual-track arcing has a robust following. Head embraced carving as its central ideology when it introduced the Cyber series in the mid-1990’s, and it’s never lost its allegiance to the carving cause. And Head has a license to use Graphene, giving its engineers the means and the motive to create a light carving series to go along with its already well-established band of beefy, Supershape trench diggers.
With Graphene in its arsenal, Head has embraced lightweight design with the fervor it once brought to the early carving craze. The unapologetic objective of the V-Shape series is to create the lightest on-piste design possible. There are still traditional elements in the V-Shape 10, such as carbon, fiberglass and ash alongside Karuba in its wood core, but it’s Graphene that makes its LYT Tech construction possible.
The obvious point about the V-Shape 10’s LYT Tech design is it’s much lighter than the norm among men’s Frontside models. But the big trick in LYT Tech’s bag is how it uses Graphene to change one of a ski’s most fundamental features, its core profile.
Through all the disruptive design changes that have roiled the ski world in the past 30 years – shaped skis, fat skis, rockered baselines – you could always count on a ski being thicker in the middle and thinner at the ends. But Graphene’s ability to affect stiffness without affecting mass allows Head to toy with flex distribution in unique ways. The V-Shape 10 is made thinner through the middle so it can be loaded with less exertion, a major differentiator between it and, say, a Supershape e-Titan.
The V-Shape 10 is also dissimilar to more traditional carving models – and the rest of the All-Mountain East genre – in its sidecut. Classic carvers, like Head’s Supershape series, have some flare to the tail so it will want to continue to arc across the fall line, but the V-Shape 10 sports a steep tip-to-tail taper, so it wants to straighten out the moment edge pressure is released. Compared to the relatively shallow forebodies that dominate among AME, the V-Shape 10’s massive 54mm drop between tip width and the waist, makes it turn-crazy.
Compared to an alternative carving set-up, with a fat, shock-sucking plate and a metal-laden make-up, the V-Shape 10 feels like nothing at all. Says one of our veteran testers, “I wasn’t even sure they were still on my feet. Impressive performance for its weight. Floats on powder and carves on ice.”
Once you get past its crazy weightlessness, you’ll find the V-Shape 10 is a smooth operator with an innate desire to lay down dual tracks on groomers of any pitch. While numbers never tell the whole story, it’s worth noting that the V-Shape 10 strikes a near-perfect balance between its aggregate Finesse and Power scores. It’s plenty quick enough to negotiate bumps and has enough float to finagle powder, but the V-Shape 10 is at heart a Frontside carver masquerading as an all-terrain ski. All of its attributes aim to make on-piste carving easier. Anything else you can make it do is a bonus.
For fulfilling its promise to make advanced skiing simpler and less tiring, we again award the V-Shape 10 a Silver Skier Selection.
