We’ve been pretty busy here, and haven’t provided a lot of updates. But we’ve learned a lot, and had some good success. I’ll write up a full report on the whole week once we’re home. In the meantime – here are some ideas for tomorrow’s skate races.
Paraffins have been fairly consistent for us all week. It seems that the snow wants a combination of fairly hard paraffin and quite high fluoro content. We’ve had good success during the warmer parts of the week with HF Blue/Yellow mixed. The Vauhti HF Yellow is quite a hard yellow with very high fluoro content. Yesterday and today we decided to push things a step further and try mixing a relatively low-melt-point fluoro powder in with the HF Blue. We’ve ended up really liking the HF Blue with some Zero Fox sprinkled into it. Kind of a sketchy thing – I’ve never really tried that before. Paraffin needs to be fluid, and capable of being absorbed into solution in the base in order to provide its bulk-properties to the base material. I don’t really know if we’re achieving that, or just leaving the powder at the surface. But it appears that we’re getting good integration of the admixture on the base, and there is certainly wax being absorbed. More importantly, it’s winning the testing. So, what the heck? Worth trying on a pair or two.
Early in the week powders seemed to be a bit of a liability compared with liquid top-coats run alone. But starting with Sunday’s sprints, we found that powders were enhancing even the short-term performance of the top coats, and there is no question that we’re running powder for the long distance races. We don’t often have great luck with the older powders, but today the Zero Fox did really well in testing at around 11:00AM. However, temps were still below the forecast low overnight temperature. By the time we got into race-time temps we really liked the C139 CODE powder from Vauhti. This is a relatively new powder that they started testing last Spring, and it’s been excellent so far. Vauhti is re-releasing it’s hfC line-up with adjustments, and the new hfC9.1 will be the same as this C139. The old hfC9 has been really good in finer-grained high-moisture snow, but this C139 has certainly shown a broader range. We didn’t run the hfC9 today, but we might put it on the snow tomorrow. Clearly, we’ll retest powders in the morning.
Top coats have been consistent all week. hfC15 liquid has been outstanding, and the hfC9 liquid has run really well in the afternoons. Today, after testing six different topcoats (we’ll run a larger selection tomorrow morning) and ten different powders, the best two skis were C139 and hfC15 liquid. Based on our experience from the sprint day I would expect those two to do really well in combination.
It’s worth noting that the Start SRF99 block has been really good as well. We have generally picked the hfC15 liquid over the 99 block everywhere except for the stadium area. However, for the mass-start races the stadium area is tactically the most important part of the course – at least, if it comes down to a group finish. The big question is whether we can get 30K out of a fluoroblock application. I think we can come close with the High Friction cork from Red Creek. But maybe most importantly, testing on sprint day indicated that the combination of powder/block/liquid was very good. What about durability? Good question. Will the powder wear-off and take the liquid with it? Heck if I know. What I do know is that we’ve had good luck mixing block and liquid top-coats in layers in the past. A good powder will be important, and I’m confident that any advantage – even a short-term one – will be appreciated. So we’ll make the fastest skis we can make for the start of the race, and hope for the best!
Finally – hand structure. I was expecting it to be a big deal when we first got to the venue, and I’ve got to say that it really didn’t amount to much in our first day or two of testing, including the classic race. But on the sprint day it seemed very significant, and the Red Creek 0/-10 was excellent. Given the relatively high overnight temps, we’ll be running hand structure tests again tomorrow morning.
Since I don’t have many pictures from the last few days, I’ll share this video of Gunnar hitting the Whale’s Tail descent. Speeded up, in order to be extra cool.