Today was our first full day of testing, and we ran a whole bunch of tests. It’s alway necessary to test a lot early in a week like this to get a good picture of how things are working. It’s late, and we’ve got an early morning start to race day tomorrow, so I’ll make a brief rundown:
Paraffin testing –
Mundahl and I ran 8 paraffins starting at about 8:30 AM. In general the skis felt fast – that always earns some confidence. The original plan was to run the speed trap (because everybody loves numbers), but there was no good place to run the test. Erik actually set-up in the hollow, and about four pairs into the test a snow cannon started blowing fresh manmade snow on him. So, back to subjective feel testing!
We tested blind – without knowledge of what was on the skis, and quickly narrowed the selection down to four skis. Then we did some side-by-side glide-outs. That’s where two testers get going down a hill, holding hands to make sure they’re going the same speed. Then they let go, and you get a good side by side sense of how the skis are running in comparison with each other. Of course, you’ve got to trade skis and average the results. This was supposed to be an equal test set-up with the short fat 145lb guy and the tall, skinny 145 guy, but Mundahl didn’t make weight. He’s over 150 right now. Fatty. Anyway, it worked out fine, and we got good results.
In early testing we liked:
LF Green
HF Blue
HF Blue/Yellow
A little later – around women’s start time, Erik confirmed that LF Green was actually improving. But around mid-day, when it had really warmed up considerably, the HF Blue/Yellow was best, just like yesterday. However, given that HF Blue was really close in every test, from the coldest to the warmest conditions, we decided to run that on race skis, with an LF Green underlayer.
Powder – Erik ran this one on his own, and reported pretty clear results.
Early, directly after the first paraffin test, he liked:
C11
330C
hfC21
hfC15
But, an important note is that once skiers hit the snow in any kind of numbers, the hfC15 Liquid really jumped to the front and was considerably better than all the powders. This remained the case during later retesting of the powders and that one liquid.
Meanwhile, Amy was working on kick wax testing. In her basewax test she found a different result from yesterday, with K-base drywax binder offering the best combination on kick and speed. The super base felt a bit lean to her, and the super mixed with K-base klister was slow. A few other folks reported similar findings, so that gave us some confidence. We’ll test again tomorrow, of course.
For kicking wax, Amy found that the K18 was good, but that the K15 offered a bit more bite in the kick. We ended up liking the feeling of K18 with a layer of K15 on top. The K18 has really consistent viscosity and is a good cushion, while the K15 has more multigrade material and can offer enhanced speed in many situations, and some extra kick today. Kris and I skied the race loop on that combo and had fine skis – especially after the first climb up under the bridge, which was a bit slick. Once again, we’ll test more tomorrow.
After Kris and I skied the course at about noon, we turned our attention to hand structure and top coats.
Hand Structure results:
Red Creek 0/-10
Finite CP17 L (one roller)
Red Creek 0/-10 +2mm+1mm
Finite CP17 X (both rollers)
Red Creek 0/-6
Red Creek -5/-20
Finally, for top-coats we got all hands on deck, with (cousin) Anya Bean and Todd Eastman joining the crew. We ran fifteen different top coat combinations. The first order of business was to test the hf15 liquid alone, versus the hfC15 liquid on top of the C11 powder that was the best of the powders earlier. We found that the C11 did slow the liquid down. The skis were better with liquid alone.
As the test progressed we had almost 100% agreement on the skis among four independent subjective testers. That was cool. We got sucked into a little too much testing in the stadium, where we found some of the fluoro blocks running really well – better than the liquids. In the stadium (including the downhill on the old sprint course through the Olympic XC stadium) there were a number of fluoro blocks, including hfC15 block, Start SFR99 and Toko HB004 that were feeling really excellent. But above the stadium, and especially on the natural snow, the hfC15 and hfC9 liquids were clearly the best. It’s important to remember that we were testing in the afternoon. Once again, we’ll run more tests tomorrow morning.