We still have a few spots left in our race wax service, but we're starting to fill up, so reserve your spot now. Let the pros do the hard work while you relax and get ready for your race.
Sunday & Monday recommendations at the end...
Saturday Race Summary
Rain began sprinkling down at midnight Friday just as we finished all of the race pairs for the next day. Around 4:30AM, wet snow began falling - hard - and by 5:30 when we were busy changing the final layers we had just put on a few hours ago, there was already 3 inches on the ground. We finished glide waxing all of our racers' skis at 7:45 and frantically packed up the car to get over to the race course and begin testing kick waxes for our first racers' start at 9:30.
We are working as part of the Swix Tech Team and quickly coordinated with them on kick wax and structure testing. We also called Clarke Sullivan, The Rossignol Team's wax guru to work with him on kick waxing. We had made up a pair of Hairies skis the night before, expecting they might be useful, and so that was the first thing we tested.
Getting good kick wax when the temps are around freezing is a challenge becuase very slight changes in temperature result in dramatic physical changes to the snow due to the phase change from ice to water. Waxes in this range tend to have very small windows where they work well and often a wax that is great one minute will be terrible five minutes later.
Hairies are made by aggressively abrading the kick zone and they work by physically grabbing the snowpack without any grip wax on the skis. The abraded base hairs are burnt using a torch to "dull" them so they don't collect water and ice up. In a wet snowpack around freezing, there is a lot of free moisture. If this moisture collects on the kick zone, it tends to freeze to the ski and the surrounding snow if the ski passes through a colder zone. This results in a block of ice stuck to the bottom of the ski, which tends to be not fun. After the hairs are singed with the torch, a chemical de-icer is usually applied. Swix FC8 liquid works really well for this, and Silicon spray can be used in a pinch.
The problem with hairies, as with most waxes that work in this zone, is that the window they work in is very small and they seem to stop working very quickly, so conditions need to be relatively stable to use them with confidence. As we were testing, snow was falling so hard that the tracks that had been groomed a few minutes in front of us were already full of snow. It was tough to predict what would result when 1400 racers took to the course, so deciding on the race wax would not be easy.
We exchanged a few phone calls with Clarke to share ideas and decide which waxes he would test and which ones we would try. One hour and five phone calls later, every wax combination we knew of was still inferior to hairies. We headed back to our tent and got busy roughing up the skis.
A crowd grew around us as we finished up the skis and as soon as we handed off all of our early racers' skis, we were inundated with foreign skiers looking for help waxing their skis. Many entertaining "conversations" ensued, trying to describe technical waxing details through aggressive gesturing. We even had to shut down a few overly-enthusiastic Eastern European men who were raiding our wax kits.
While the men raced, we crossed our fingers that the hairies would hold out for the whole race and began searching for the wax combination that would replace them upon the inevitable change in conditions that would happen before the women started. Klisters, hard waxes, combinations, layers, covers, mixes. We called Clarke and reported failure after failure. We would find something, then it would not work a few minutes later. Ten anxious women and their entourages of husbands, friends and family watched as we raced frantically between the test track and wax tent to try out new combinations.
We liked Swix VR75 on our test skis, but two of the skiers who tried it didn't have enough kick, so we called Clarke one more time. He had a Guru klister that he was mixing in the VR75 that gave a little extra kick without icing. Nathan raced 800m over to grab the tube from him since we didn't have it, sprinted back and then the frenzy of panic waxing began. After we had applied the wax on two pairs of skis, Clarke called to tell us to only put it in the middle of the foot because it was too aggressive. Hmmm. Scrape two pairs and re-start.
We finally finished all of the skis but in our haste had forgotten to emphasize to our skiers how important it was to stay in the track and keep the skis moving in order to avoid icing. Two of the women stopped to take off warm-up clothes and the powder they were standing in immediately froze to the kick zone. Frantic husbands ran back to us and we scraped the chunks of snow off, put on cover to help prevent icing and told the husbands to relay that the ladies should stay in the track and keep the skis moving. Period.
As the last woman raced out of the stadium, we were relieved. We had been running full throttle for over six hours and it was nice to have gotten through it. Just as we were starting to relax, it began snowing again. A sense of dread fell over us thinking about the women out there with six inches of powder stuck on their klister, and we packed up our kit in a daze. Luckily, the overwhelming number of women out on the course kept the tracks clean as the snow fell, and most of our women were happy with their skis.
Nobody had fantastic skis out there today. We saw pretty much everything: people winning on waxless skis, hairies, kick wax, klister and gigantic snow stilts stuck to the bottom of horribly overwaxed skis. Everyone was talking about where their skis were good, where their skis were bad. The one interesting thing was that it was rare to hear anyone say, "I should have done...." Nobody had The Answer today.
Sunday Skate Race Recommendations
Quick recommendation: Q1.3 or ZR40XL grind with possible hand structure. HF7 for race starts before 10AM, HF8 for after 10AM. FC8 for everyone as the final layer.
Somehow amid the chaos we found time to test glide wax and structure for Sunday's skate races. The structure tests were somewhat meaningless as the new snow will change dramatically by tomorrow, but we did find that Swix HF7 and FC8 were the fastest Swix products early. HF8 will be best for those who start after 10AM.
Now that we have gotten situated and through the first race, we expect to have a lot more time to broaden our testing to cover more waxes and structures. We've only been using about half of our test fleet of 14 pairs of skis and now we should be able to get the full fleet waxed up and testing every day. That means we'll be able to test the best of each brand against each other and choose the overall winner.
Wait to apply hand structure until just before your race. Come by the Swix tent and we can let you know our test results and help you apply structure.
Monday Predictions
Temps look to cool down Sunday night, but it will warm up quickly Monday. What the snow will look like is too hard to call at this point, but we should have a much better idea Sunday after the new snow is groomed and settles overnight. Our guess is that we will have a cold, hard track that should be very fast. Hopefully the cold night will keep the snow cold through all of the races.