SHQ

All photos by Jérôme Houyvet

Micah Buzianis on the Generation V Slalom Board Development:

"In March 2009 it was time for the long trip for me from Maui to Cape Town South Africa and from France for Antoine to meet up with Werner and start the development on the Gen VI JP slalom boards.

Cape Town is a great place to test out all sorts of equipment and slalom is no exception.
With lots of different wind and water conditions it is ideally set up to get a wide range of conditions to test all the new JP protos.
Plus Werner is very well set up with his design factory and a place for us to stay right at Sunset beach.

Upon our arrival Werner had six new protos ready for us to test and we were amped to get out on the water and get to work. The wind was perfect for the ten days in Cape Town, we saw anywhere from 8-40 knots. We were sailing on the ocean most days but we even had a couple of very good days on the lake to test out the flat water performance and feel.

We had decided to make six different sizes for this year so there would end up being two different quivers of boards for the slalom 6/3 rules, one for lighter guys and one for heavier guys.

Our main performance goal was to make the boards easier to sail, both in the way that they handled on the water but also the comfort under your feet. This first round of boards didn't go exactly as we wanted, the 59 and 65 both felt better straight away but the other sizes still needed a little tweaking.

We also needed to work on the rail shaped under our feet, we didn't want to change the volume to radically nor did we want to change the deck flow.

So we came up with an idea to put a raised area directly under the footpads to try to have your foot in a more comfortable position and have more contact with the board at all times. Werner put a couple of rough protos of the bumps in the boards we already had and we noticed a huge improvement right away.

After ten days of solid sailing and only one day of no wind we already had made some positive steps and Werner was ready for round two of protos to bring to Maui in six weeks.

Six weeks later, Werner met Antoine, Robby Swift, Enes Yilmazer and myself in Maui for the JP photo shoot and the second round of testing. He had six more boards with him all with slightly new bottom shapes, the race bumps or race deck as they are now called and we were ready to go.

This time we were really glad to have Robby and Enes around to help us test the boards this way we really had some good input from the guys who would actually be riding the "smaller guy" range of boards in race conditions. We were all able to try out all the sizes just to make sure they would feel good for all riders and then we focused in on the sizes we would each be riding come race time. Robby and Enes spent the rest of the time working on the 56, 65 an 76 and Antoine and I worked on the 59, 68 and 82 all supervised by Werner of course.

It is great to be able to work with someone like Werner because he is such a good and knowledgeable sailor that he can go out and try the stuff with us and get his own feel and also then better understand us when we are trying to explain a feel or a change to him, this really makes things go much smoother.

After our solid three weeks of testing time in Maui and after a few small tweaks on the rockers and bottoms we had found what we were looking for. With the new rocker and bottom shape in line with the race deck the boards became much easier to sail and control over a broader range of wind and water state.

We also found with the new RACE DECK that fatigue was not such an issue as it was in the past, with slalom this can really make a big difference when it comes time to gybe. I think that we had also come up with a board that is much easier to gybe, while this wasn't a main focus for us we felt big improvements in this area as well. In the end we were all very happy with the new size ranges, it is going to make it much easier for us to choose which boards we will race with this season and it will fit our quivers much better as well.

All the testing was finished in April and five months later we got the finished product in Maui ready for the exclusive JP slalom shoot. The boards came out looking very sleek, with a new paint job and new curves they look extremely state of the art.

Immediately on our first few runs the boards felt way more comfortable and easy to sail, this translated directly into better top speeds and control and acceleration in the turns. The photo shoot was a blast on these new boards, two full days in Kihei speed sailing around on the flat water and one day on the North Shore in the chop and waves. Antoine and I both are very impressed with the final products.

So in the end it does seem like a lot of travel and a lot of work for us all but the when the final results are like this it is very rewarding, to see the improvements like this makes us very proud and excited to race on these JP machines.
I think everyone out there that gets a chance to ride one of the new GEN VI JP slalom boards will see what I mean.

Cheers
Micah
USA 34