Austin was back on the testing beat today in West Yellowstone and he generated one of the more interesting set of results I’ve seen. Since it was a snowy day, and still warmer than we expect for race day, we didn’t invest in too much test material on the snow. Austin just prepared a single fleet with some paraffin solutions based on yesterday’s testing, and some powders, to start getting an idea of how that was going to play out.
Had you asked me ahead of time, I would not have predicted that the powders would be much slower than the paraffins. As you can see from the test results this was unequivocally the case. It’s not that I just assume that powders are always going to be faster; I know the paraffins can win tests. However, yesterday’s testing appeared to clearly be favoring higher fluoro content, and our previous testing in West Yellowstone has pretty much always had powders at least on-par. But based on today’s test I’d really need to see some new information to feel comfortable that powders will be part of the race solution. Still, there’s plenty of time left for new information!
The other very interesting note was that the 10F hardener as an underlayer below the HF blue just creamed everything else in the test. 1.3% is a colossal butt-whooping. We tend to find that a difference of 0.3% (with good significance) is reliably detectable by pretty much anybody testing by feel. So, after yesterday, when the differences weren’t that large, it was a surprise to see this result. For what it’s worth, I have very high confidence that these results are “real”. Anytime we see differences this large with distinct groupings in similar solutions (paraffins versus powders, for example), we feel confident that we’re measuring real differences. And our significance calculation is also reinforcing that confidence.
Lessons? Nothing I’m willing to stake my life on, and certainly not anything I’d bet on for the much colder forecasted race conditions coming up. We ended up on 10F under HF violet last year in slightly warmer conditions, so I’m not totally surprised by this. Tomorrow we’re run another full paraffin test. We’re continuing to focus on chasing down paraffin solutions because when powders aren’t in play, paraffins take on a much larger significance. And when differences on the order of 1.3% are available, you want to be on the right (fast) side of that gap!
We’ll also run a fluoro test tomorrow. That test will have a paraffin reference ski (no pure fluoro coating) as a control. We’ll focus mostly on application methods, testing powders, blocks and liquids. On the morning of the sprint the racing starts at 9 AM. Practically speaking it’ll be important for teams to have good control of their paraffin and powder situation the night before. There isn’t a great opportunity to test and then powder ski in the morning. So if powders are still slowing skis down tomorrow, it’s unlikely that we’ll be suggesting that people put powder on race skis! My bet is that we’ll see some benefit from the fluoro blocks, and possibly even liquids. On race morning there will be time to chase a lot of different options in the block and liquid categories, and that’ll be important.
The other critical factor on race day is likely to be hand structure. Even in quite cold conditions, hand structure can make a huge difference. We’ve got a fleet of skis dedicated to hand structure, and Austin might have time to get a start on that tomorrow.