Amy arrived in West Yellowstone on Sunday evening, and had the opportunity on Monday to ski her brains out before Tom arrived Monday night with all of our test skis and wax. Today, however, the work began. With several days of testing available before the racing starts, Amy decided to get the lay of the land with a paraffin test today. She hasn’t had the time or inclination to really fill me in on everything, but she sent one photograph, and some test data from the speed trap. And she described the conditions to me on the phone as “low humidity, really skied in hard track, oh, there’s Colin, I need to go, bye.”
Results are below. We waxed up this test at home before Tom started driving, and we kept it pretty simple. We assumed that HF Blue would be in the range, and we tested that alone, as well as on top of LF Green as a hardener, and LF Graphite as an underlayer. As usual, we ran some basic statistics on the speed trap results to measure significance. And as usual (with an average data set) we saw significance with differences of about 0.3%.
| Rank | Base | Paraffin | Time | % | Sig |
| 1 | LF Green | 8.652 | 0.00% | 91.31% | |
| 2 | HF Blue | 0.027 | 0.31% | 54.50% | |
| 3 | LF Green | HF Blue | 0.037 | 0.42% | 56.07% |
| 4 | LF Graphite | HF Blue | 0.056 | 0.65% | 47.07% |
| 5 | HF Violet | 0.101 | 1.16% | 10.34% | |
| 6 | HF Pink | 0.345 | 3.98% | 96.77% |
The interesting thing is that the temp was 22 degree F (Tom got in very late, and they got a pretty late start to testing – around 11AM), and LF Green won the test. Interesting, but not surprising. Based on what I had heard from a couple of different sources, I more or less expected that result by the time Amy sent me the data. The Vauhti LF green is excellent in extreme cold, but it feels more elastic and plastic than many very hard and brittle greens. There are certainly times when a harder wax is desirable, but the LF Green does amazingly well in high altitude fine-grained snow in moderate temperatures. We’ve even seen it win tests above freezing in very fresh snow.
A couple more notes:
- Clearly harder waxes were testing better. By the time we get into the violets and pinks we see the performance really suffering.
- Hardening underlayers and anti-static did not appear to help the performance of LF Blue. However, it did not appear to hurt the performance that badly. In a head to head t-test of blue versus blue over green there is only a 7% chance that the green slowed the blue down, and in a similar comparison with blue over graphite, there is only a 24% chance that the graphite slowed the blue down. Still, I wouldn’t say there is compelling reason to run hardeners or graphite under a blue-range paraffin.
Tomorrow Amy will test some powders and liquids. Even with the hard paraffin running well, my guess is that fluoro coats will run fairly true to the temperature. The paraffins provide bulk properties, while the fluoros are surface coatings. I’d be surprised if the really cold fluoros are winning. That would be cool – I love surprises!
Here’s a PDF of our testing summary:
Nov26WestYellowstoneParaffintest