Recent Discovery - Spirit Snowboards
Recent Discovery - Spirit Snowboards
We recently received an email from Max at Spirit Snowboards, an Italian company that makes a complete line of nice looking carving boards and bindings. I was a little surprised to see their line-up having honestly never heard of the company or seeing their equipment even mentioned on any of the carving web sites I frequent. So, I surfed over to their excellent web site and had a look.
When I hear about a new player in the carving game, I would expect them to have one or two boards, and maybe one model of bindings. Spirit actually has three boards (possibly only two for '06) and three models of bindings. They also offer custom boards and women specific versions.
Boards - Spirit's two main carving boards are the Radikal (shown at left in red) and the Piega. The Radikal is the less expensive of the two (list price on the web site is 472 Euro) and offers some pretty impressive features. It is available in 158, 168 and 178 cm lengths, each with an 18cm waist width and sidecuts of 9.5m, 10m and 17m respectively. Other features include an ultra-light core for a claimed 15% weight reduction and the "Carbon VAS" anti-vibration system.
The Piega (514 Euro at the time of writing) is Spirit's performance oriented board. Spirit says that the Piega has seen extensive action on the world cup circuit over the past few years so you can probably count on a high speed machine. The Piega is offered in 158, 173 and 183cm lengths, each with a 19cm waist. Sidecuts are 9.3m, 12m and 16m respectively. It features the same ultra-light core and "Quadra X" laminate as the Radikal.
Bindings - We can't forget about the bindings. It's nice to see another player in the binding industry. These bindings look like they will fit in nicely with the likes of Bomber, CATEK, SnowPro, F2, etc. As I mentioned, they offer three models at three price points. The Tracer FX is the least expensive (at 140 Euro) but still offers many features found on more expensive bindings. The base plate and toe and heel blocks are CNC machined of Ergal Aluminum and 5mm Inox wire is used for the toe and heel bale. I couldn't tell for certain from the details on the web site but it looks like to toe bale lever is plastic. This binding appears to be designed with a little more forgiveness than Spirit's more performance oriented bindings. A variety of accessories for canting (under the heel) and lifting are also available.
The World Cup Giant binding (190 Euro) provides a more bomb-proof binding for the more performance oriented rider. It upgrades to a thicker base plate with a PVC anti-vibration disk underneath and 6mm bales. Again, it is hard to tell from the web site, but the toe bale lever looks like it might be aluminum on this one. Similar accessories for canting, etc are also available here.
Finally, there is the World Cup Slalom binding (200 Euro). This binding shares the same overall design and features as the World Cup Giant but it has been tweaked to suit the slalom discipline. It provides a different shape and flex pattern in the base plate to better suit the rapid transitions of slalom racing. This is the first time I have seen such specialized equipment but I think this is a great symbol of the health of our sport.
For more info on this equipment, check out the web site at www.spiritsnowboards.com. All their equipment is available from their site and payment can be made via PayPal for piece of mind.
