Bruce Varsava & Jasey Jay board talk

[bschurman]

I got an interesting email from Bruce today about a conversation that he had with Jasey Jay yestersday discussing boards and the different constructions. I personally find board construction for different situations extremely interesting, so maybe there are others out there that do too.

I did get Bruce's permission to post it so I am posting it below.

->Ben

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"Mostly we talked about the effect of the dampening on the different boards as it looks like different conditions need the different dampening at that level of competition. At the indoor event he found the superboard slalom board was too damp and it detracted from the pop needed to get through the relatively straight easy course. He used his regular World Cup construction board and found it worked just fine. He made a small mistake on the 2nd run but still qualified fastest then got knocked out by Grabner by 3/100ths in the round of 8. Too bad, it would have been awesome if he and Adam made it to the finals! All North American final in Europe! Oh well, maybe next time. The GS superboard is definitely his favorite for that aspect of racing as he stated it is superior. He also figures that for steep icy slalom courses the superboard construction will be the ticket as control rather than pop is necessary to get down fastest. No doubt the areas to concentrate on now are materials for dampening vs rebound. Getting it right on a board that will work best in the widest variety of conditions will be the goal. He mentioned that other European riders had some interesting designs incorporating carbon which worked well but were still not totally refined so it looks like it is now going to be a materals battle as well as just the overall flex, twist,sidecut and stiffness equation. I'm pretty well placed at this time as I now know what to put in to make it not damp enough or too damp so its just a balancing act now and there certainly will be some new stuff I come up with at some point.

Oh well, every year I figure there is nothing left to learn but I'm so used to being wrong about that , I now expect to come up with something new at some time during the year."

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