Every product line needs a star, and for Atomic’s Vantage series, that star is the 90 CTi. Its lightweight construction belies a deep power reserve, capable of cutting into Vermont marble-hard boilerplate or turning aside a boulder of ossified Sierra cement. It’s a ski seemingly without preferences, willing to make short turns or long, at putter-along speeds or with the gas pedal floored.
Perhaps best of all for the skier who hopes to ski 50 days a year and ends up with 20, the 90 CTi isn’t an elitist that requires top-shelf management to release its potential. It doesn’t care where or how you like to travel, and won’t place limits on your opportunities to explore off-trail conditions.
Crisp turn entry, clear snow sensations shining through the turn midsection and confident finishing power are traits any Frontside ski would be proud to possess. Salomon’s X-Drive 8.0 FS is built on these principles and it lives up to them every day it’s allowed out to ski.
The X-Drive 8.0 FS gets its gumption from a blend of three dampening elements. Like it’s big bro, the 8.8 FS, it uses basalt as a base layer, then adds a sheet of Titanal and an X-shaped structure over the rocker zones to keep them from acting up. This creates “a great combination of edge grip (torsional stiffness) and off-piste versatility,” pens Sturtevant’s Olin Glenne, placing it on his personal podium in the Frontside category.
It’s only natural that a ski like Völkl’s V-Werks Katana would shine when evaluated according to our Realskiers methodology. Our criteria are biased in favor of skis that scribe a continuous arc, a rare sighting in the Big Mountain menagerie. The V-Werks Katana’s presence atop our Power rankings is a testament to its unique capacity for applying carving characteristics to ungroomed terrain.
The new-age Katana skis like a very wide razor. What it doesn’t plane over it slices into with the confidence and panache of a fabulous fencer. Other wide skis don’t ski like this because they aren’t built like this, with 11 sheets of compressed carbon formed into a shape Völkl calls 3D.Ridge. It creates the long-sought balance between longitudinal softness and torsional rigidity that allows the ski to bow easily yet hold with the assurance of an anaconda.
Unlike most made-for-women skis, the Vantage 90 CTi W pulls practically no punches compared to its men’s counterpart. Its all-wood core is a little lighter, that’s it. The women’s ski still sports a cutout Titanal sheet called Titanium Backbone 2.0 that’s a principal contributor to the ski’s success in cruddy conditions.
The other special sauce that elevates this Vantage’s versatility is the Carbon Tank Mesh. Covering the length of the ski, the carbon component pumps up the performance in every criterion. The 90 CTi W’s relative quickness to the edge for a ski 90mm wide at the waist is directly attributable to the torsional rigidity delivered by the Carbon Tank Mesh.
It’s considered axiomatic that a ski that bends more easily is best suited to lower skill skiers who need the help. While it’s probably true that the new, softer i.Titan is more accessible to the average punter, don’t imagine for one second that it isn’t also an ecstatic epiphany for the expert.
For here’s the truly brilliant element of the new design: when Head engineers added Graphene to the i.Supershape construction, they didn’t reduce the amount of metal in the ski, they increased it. A lot, as in wall-to-wall, tip-to-tail thicker sheets. There’s your power plant, the reason that once the i.Titan is tipped on edge, there’s not a trace of shimmy in its soul.
