The Snow Crunch team met up with Nick from Rossignol to check out next year’s Soul Seven skis.
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Really fired up about our all new collection, the seven series. We’ve got a whole new collection of skis for the freeride guys out there, we’re really seeing this fusion of backcountry, freestyle, and freeride performance start to come together more and more. With this new 7 series we’re really addressing that, we’ve lightened up all the skis in the line, with some new material, some new really cool visual technology up in the tip and tail. The Soul Seven is a really exciting addition to the series for us, because it’s a 106 underfoot, a waist which we haven’t had in the line in the past, really versatile from east coast to west coast. There’s a lot of skiers out there, this ski is really going to appeal to them.
To start with, here up in the tip we’ve got this air tip technology, it’s stuff that everybody’s talking about, it’s really cool to look at. Obviously you can see right through it, it’s basically an ABS honeycomb struction. We run a film on either side of it to keep all the glue and other materials out when you lay up the ski. What that does is really reduce the swing weight, makes the ski super easy to swing around, really light maneouverable, it also brings that center of mass in closer underfoot, so you don’t have as much weight out at the extremities, so it really enhances that effortless feel that the S7 and Super 7 were known for.
We also run a paulownia wood core throughout the entire line of Seven series skis including the Soul 7 here. Paulownia is a very lightweight wood, it helps us cut the weight on these skis by about twenty percent. For those backcountry guys going on the long slog, it’s going to make a great option, but you know it’s Rossignol, we’re all about the downhill, so we’re not going to sacrifice that downhill performance to get a lightweight ski.
In addition to the paulownia, we use a race department diego fibre, lay it up in there, it keeps the ski really torsionally stiff and stable, keeps the ski damp, without adding a lot of extra weight. We do a full vertical sidewall on the ski, so you’ve got a lot of edge power and great energy transmisison, solid edge grip on hardpack, variable conditions. To help eliminate that dreaded tip flap that you get on those rocker camber hybrid skis, we’ve kind of redesigned our powder turn rocker, it’s got a much lower, longer tip rocker, same in the tail. We’ve also got a much stronger, squared off tail with a lot less rocker, so you’ve got a lot of power there, a lot less wheelie effect, but a great side effect of having that lower longer rocker, in addition to this lightweight tip, is that we’ve really eliminated that dreaded tip flap, so when you’re skiing along in variable conditions and the tip starts chattering a bit… we’ve virtually eliminated that. The lower, longer rocker, the air tip, and these VAS stringers that we run down the transition zone between rocker and camber through the back of the ski really helps dampen those vibrations and help with that issue.
The whole seven series features these nice technology and design elements, they’re all super lightweight, in addition to the Soul Seven, the Super Seven returns in name alone. It has the all new construction I’ve just mentioned, it’s going to be a commerical powder ski with 116 underfoot, with about twenty meter turn radius. We’ve also got the Squad Seven returning in name, still using all those lightweight materials, the new air tip technologies, it’s got a hard charging thirty meter turning radius and a little bit of a beefier core profile, so we’ve still got that hard charging big mountain freeride ski for the guys who need it.