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.
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.”
[Neither the Intense 12 nor its scores have changed since this review was posted two seasons ago.]
Powerdrive is Dynastar’s name for a 3-piece sidewall which functions as a unique damping system. Stacked on edge alongside the core, it consists of a soft inner layer, a hard center section and a dynamic outer wall. Any time a viscoelastic material, like that used in the inner piece of Powerdrive, is bonded to Titanal (center part), the resulting element will act as a natural shock absorber, so the forebody of the Intense 12, where the Powerdrive feature resides, should stay nice and quiet on hard snow.
But Powerdrive serves another, more vital function: by un-coupling the core from the outer sidewall, the central laminates that dictate the ski’s behavior are allowed to shear, moving as the ski is pressured. This enhanced suppleness allows the ski to respond to subtle variations in the snow surface, maintaining contact, control and speed.
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.
