It’s tempting to just scale down a fast slalom board and drop the rocker, as others have done, but we designed our speed range from scratch. With purpose. Speed sailing creates a different set of demands to slalom sailing, so we designed the optimal shape to cover important performance features, making these new speed boards outstanding.
Slalom boards need wider tails so that longer fins and more outboard foot position can be used for crosswind and upwind capability. In gybes you can accelerate quickly out of the turns in chop by providing additional surface area in the tail. When going downwind at very high speed, the wider tail board can operate efficiently with no chop and short wetted length. Cutouts help to keep the angle up, and reduce the planing area behind the foot. In chop, the board has to sit at a lower angle otherwise the impacts create too much lift, but this results in a lot of contact area and higher drag due to the width.
Our speed board shapes allow significantly reduced board width in the contact areas for a given sail size, resulting in immediate reduction in drag, and less effect from chop impact. When banking a turn with a good slalom board, forward rail engagement needs to produce a significant turning moment but with a very stable manner. Hitting chop in the gybe should result in a moderate but predictable increase in the turn rate.
Slalom board rockers, with aggressive V around the mast track, whilst helpful for turning in heavy swell and chop, causes instability where the board hits chop in this area at high speed, especially when the chop angle is not dead square to the board. One side hits the chop first, and this causes the board to roll, creating control problems and instability. The narrower the board, the more pronounced is this effect. This is the point where the board no longer “flies” and the rider has to resort to more blunt methods of control using body weight on the board to keep the fin wet and avoid spinout- increasing drag and further reducing stability.
The result is that we understand that the optimal shape for a slalom board fundamentally conflicts with those of a speedboard. In aiming to satisfy these optimisations for speed, we necessarily sacrifice the ease of gybing in heavy chop and swell to make a better speed board. On water, where our speed boards are intended to be used, the turning capability is outstanding: full control of the rail at full power and really high exit speeds. Perfect for smoking fast “alphas” on GPS.
We designed the Tribal Rapid speed board series with this, and other subtle requirements in mind. They have no-compromise stability in a straight line at high speed, even when there is moderate chop, which is inevitable at most real-world speed venues. The result looks quite different to the already super fast slalom line, but geared for practical, pure speed sailing.
Standout features are the length - slightly longer than other boards in this class (237cm), and the outline having its wide point forward, and a pronounced pin tail. Essentially we stretched the tail. The rails through the middle of the board are noticeably bulked out and jacked up, so that the board pops onto the plane easily, glides through lulls, and punches upwind for the next run.
Combined these allow a reduced wetted area for the size of the board, and starting wind range, whilst maintaining a more balanced and stable trim due to the extensive low rocker mid section. Overall you can use a smaller board comfortably, with a larger sail, in less wind, with higher overall speeds. You get to use and enjoy the true speed board more often than ever.
