For 20/20 Fischer has again re-designed the flagships of it Ranger Ti series, returning to a lay-up with twin Titanal laminates for stability and liberal use of carbon to make it responsive. Carbon inlays in the tip and tail help make the extremities thin and light, so the new Ranger 107 Ti is easier to foot steer when necessary. “It’s user-friendly but still can be skied aggressively,” notes one admiring tester. “You can take your foot off the gas and it’s still responsive.”
Compared to the Ranger 108 Ti that preceded it, the Ranger 107 Ti has a slightly less shapely silhouette and a longer contact zone underfoot, giving it more directional stability and an overall calmer disposition in the sloppy seconds that prevail on so-called powder days. Its new sidecut favors the skier who can maintain momentum through a series of rhythmic, mid-radius turns that neither enter nor exit the turn too suddenly.
The Fischer Ranger 102 FR is an interesting amalgam of Old School principles and New School attitude. At heart it’s a traditional, wood-core, glass laminate construction with square, ABS sidewalls, but on closer examination the wood laminates in the core are carved into a Chinese puzzle of latticework developed for Fischer’s market-dominating cross-country skis. To keep the lightweight Air Tec Ti core from being bounced around by stiff mounds of set-up crud, a thin sheath of Titanal covers the core underfoot.
Keeping the metal component to a minimum allows the Ranger 102 FR’s glass structure the freedom to flex under mild pressure and immediately pop back into its cambered position. Put this action/reaction pulse into motion and you have the makings of a very fun powder run.
As is universally the case among high-end skis with a low-mass objective, carbon plays a key role in keeping the My Pro MT 86 light, agile and responsive. To reinforce edging power without resorting to Titanal, the My Pro MT 86 uses square sidewalls for crisp energy transfer. Its most obvious effort at trimming mass is also so subtle it may pass notice: the top corners of what would normally be a rectangular ski have been lopped off, so there’s simply less there there, as Gertrude Stein might have said. (Ten points to whomever gets this oblique reference.) The thinner edge this creates slices more easily into the clumpy snow it’s likely to encounter off-trail.
Head wasn’t the first ski manufacturer to market a carving ski, but it was the first major brand to not only embrace the Carving concept but to adopt it as the cohering principle behind every ski it made. This primordial dedication to the art of creating a continuous track has reached its purest expression in Head’s Supershape series, where the i.Titan is the widest (80mm waist) among peers.
Despite its relatively broad beam, the i.Titan feels as quick to the edge as any 75mm stick on the slopes. It feels more agile than it measures for three main reasons. First, there’s its shape, with a 57mm drop between the tip and the waist, so as soon as it’s tipped, it’s carving on a multi-radius, continuous edge. Second, its front rocker is so shallow it does nothing to inhibit early turn entry. And third, the piezos in its tail stiffen up the rearbody when subjected to vibrations that racing across hard snow engenders.
My favorite story about how Head engineers went about optimizing Graphene – carbon in its most elemental form, a matrix of the hexagonal atom a mere one atom thick, or deep, or wide or however you want to measure something so infinitesimal – in their Supershape series of carving skis. Having already made a collection of women’s skis from scratch using the new material, the Head R&D team knew they could use Graphene to tinker with flex distribution with minimal effect on mass distribution. The logical thing to do, particularly as skis like the i.Rally weren’t famous for being light, was to trim down the core and thin out the metal laminates to make a more accessible carver for the masses.
So what did Head do? Just the opposite: it thickened the i.Rally’s top and bottom sheets of Titanal and widened them all the way to the edge, then built up the core profile for good measure. I remind you that the i.Rally Head enhanced was already the de facto standard setter in the genre, not some weak reed in dire need of a power boost. Like all the Supershapes, the i.Rally already had piezos in its tail section that when vibrated produce an electric pulse used to power a microchip which in turn tells the ski’s tail feathers to stiffen up. Point being, the i.Rally was a wickedly powerful machine before its most recent upgrades; the 19/20 edition generates enough power to illuminate the Vegas Strip.
