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In the past month we’ve had lots of opportunity to wax classic skis in cold new snow, and we’ve seen some interesting and sometimes confusing results. Over the past two weekends with Super Tour races in Craftsbury, we’ve started making a bit of sense out of the situation. In large part this is thanks to some collaborative testing where we’ve connected with Pat O’Brien and Brayton Osgood who have been working with SMS T2, and the SMS junior program. Pat and Brayton are both strong skiers and outstanding wax testers. With a small selection of test skis and two pilots like these guys, we can put a lot of wax on the snow really quickly. What we’ve seen in the past two weekends in single-digit temperatures has been surprising and consistent.
When we’re testing wax we’re generally looking for evidence of a standard bell-curve distribution. It makes a certain logical sense; there should be one hardness range that is optimal for the conditions, and you should be able to detect a loss of performance with waxes that are too hard, and also a loss of performance with waxes that are too soft. When we’re confident that we’ve seen diminishing returns on both sides of the bell curve, we can be pretty sure that we’re operating in the optimal range, and we can explore that range for the very best waxes. What we’ve seen in recent cold conditions is a more complex picture, amounting to a bell curve with two peaks. If you google-search “bell curve with two peaks” you quickly find references to bimodal or multimodal distributions. Cool. That sounds way better than “screwy kick wax results”.
To preface our specific findings, I will say that these results make sense in light of other observations about basewax and about wax both hardwax and klister in warmer conditions. These observations are best summarized by making a distinction between “hardness” and “stiffness” of a given wax. In my mind, hardness describes penetrability, while stiffness has more to do with elastic response. Or, put a different way, hardness is best thought of as a vertical characteristic through the layer thickness of the wax job, while stiffness might be better thought of as a horizontal characteristic. We have focused a lot of attention on basewax testing, and made the point that finding the right stiffness and elastic response from the basewax has profound implications for both kick and glide.
We’ve also seen this phenomenon when we’re using soft and low camber skis in warm hardwax or klister conditions. Specifically, we’ve seen that skis with a very low camber often seem to require a softer rather than harder kick wax for speed, even though we normally think of harder waxes as being “faster”. I have attributed this to the harder waxes being too “stiff” – it feels like you’re dropping a brick into the track and the wax is just plowing snow.
What we’ve seen in the past two weekends at Craftsbury is a situation that I’ve tried to illustrate with the image to the right. With temperatures starting at or well below zero degrees F (-18C), we’ve seen our standard favorites at the coldest end of the range, like Rex Mantyranta and Rode Special Green, providing oddly slow skis, and poor kick. Waxes in the standard green range – specifically Rode Green, Start Synthetic Green, and Guru Green – have been pretty good. And when we get up into the cold blue range – Rode Multigrade, Vauhti synthetic blue, K19 – we see a big drop-off in speed. Some of those waxes were producing incredible kick (“like nails” is what Brayton said about Synthetic Blue one day) while others were actually leaner on kick than the greens, but as a rule they were running slow.
At this point, if we started our testing in the green range and didn’t have a lot of testing resources, we’d consider the testing complete, and figure that we’ve seen both sides of the bell curve. The speed liability on those cold blues put them out of play unless it was a way to bring the kick up by burying a layer under the foot. And as it stood, I think that a simple wax job in that green range (with the right green) probably would have produced good race skis for most people, though we certainly saw potential for the wrong combination of greens to produce both poor speed and poor kick.
But since we had the time and the test pilots, we pushed the testing a bit further, and started to pick up a new level of kick feeling from stuff in the warm blue range. It’s worth noting that the testing procedure was blind. I was waxing skis and putting them on the snow, but Pat and Brayton didn’t know what was on the skis, so there was no way for their expectation to inform their sensation. Blind testing is cumbersome – it requires more resources to make it work – but I’m always more confident with the results of blind testing than when the pilots know what they’re skiing on. At any rate, as we expanded our blind testing, Rode -1 -7 race service wax was really strong kicking, and this past Sunday for the 15K mass start, the Rode VO, Swix VR45, and Vauhti K12 were all providing a qualitatively different experience than the green range. This doesn’t sound so exceptional – of course waxes that warm would provide significantly more kick! But in practice, good kick that you can use is heavily dependent on good speed. If the wax is really slow, the kick doesn’t feel as strong because you can’t move freely. To illustrate the point you can do the thought experiment of taking the situation to the logical extreme. Let’s say you had crampons under the ski – big spikes. By definition you’ve have superior grip to just about any kick wax. And yet, if you tried to ski those skis up a hill it’s pretty obvious that you’d spend a ton of energy churning snow and you wouldn’t glide very far. Under the circumstances, your perception of kick would suffer along with your lack of speed. So when we say that the cold violets were providing qualitatively better kick performance at temperatures in the single digits, there is a certain statement being made about the viability of the speed as well.
We’ve seen this phenomenon a number of times now, and in light of the number of data points we were able to gather in the past two weekends, some other “strange” results also start to make more sense. Like Magnar 2 as race wax for the 30K at US Nationals in Houghton. On Sunday we had a choice between viable skis with a kick cushion of strong kicking cold blue covered by a fast green, and skis with a kick cushion of cold violet covered with a fast blue. The colder option was building up very slightly faster, but the stronger kicking option was providing qualitatively better kick. In the end we put Kris out on VO covered with Guru blue. We went that way because in a mass start event with falling snow, I felt that the speed would be determined more heavily by position in the pack – the leader would have slow skis compared to the followers no matter how fast his skis were, and by a bigger margin than could be covered with the fastest viable kicking wax. However, given the difficult climbs over three laps, qualitatively easier climbing could make a big difference. Going for the strong kick might not always be the right call, and it can surely backfire (which it did for Erika Flowers on Sunday). But it seemed to work pretty well for Kris on Sunday, and on balance we’ve had success working on the softer and kickier end of the spectrum for the last two weeks.
I would stop well short of making any kind of “rule of thumb” about this type of bimodal response in the spectrum of kick waxes. Often enough the soft waxes just ice up and you can’t go there, and even more often they’re just plain slow. But I have a feeling that this kind of phenomenon is in play to one degree or another more frequently than we guess. You can probably spot the days by reviewing the post-race chatter – sometimes it seems like everybody finds the same solution, while on other days you hear about people out there on waxes from the cold greens all the way to the violets. If you want to try to take away some sort of generalization, I can say the following: I have a hunch that these bimodal kick conditions which favor unexpectedly warm kick waxes, will also prove accommodating of more rather than less aggressively elastic base waxes, and surprisingly warm fluoro top coats. As an example, I can cite the tendency in the past two weeks for Vauhti Super base to win testing even though we would expect the AT base, or the super base mixed with some normal blue-range drywax, to provide better performance. So, rule of thumb: If you’re testing base waxes and you find an unexpectedly elastic or soft base to be the best, then toss some unexpectedly soft kick waxes into the mix. Another example; on Sunday we had a fluoro top-coat test with the results ranked as follows: LDR powder corked, hfC9.1 block, hfC15.1 block, hfC21.1 block (we had previously eliminated liquids for in head to head testing with blocks). While LDR is a bit of a wild-card, the hfC series ranked directly from warmest to coldest, and this in single-digit temperatures and falling snow. And for what it’s worth, we struggled with visibility in freezing mist for the entire drive home, even though the snow that hit the ground was dry and powdery. So, another rule of thumb: If warm kick waxes are unexpectedly good, try some warmer top coats, and stock up on washer fluid for the drive home!