12'6” Race Board Speed TestWith the Summer race season underway, we at SUP VIC and RPS The Boardstore decided to run speed tests on some popular 12'6” stock race boards currently available here in Melbourne, Australia.
First we raided the RPS demo fleet, and then bolstered that with a couple of boards provided by SUP VIC members to come up with 8 of the leading boards on the local market circa November 2011.
We decided on a flat water course of approximately 500 metres total, consisting 250 metres into the wind, a turn around a stationary buoy, and then 250 metres downwind. We decided to include a buoy turn within the timing simply because the ability to be able to turn a board is imperative in pretty much every form of 12'6” racing that we do. This helped some boards and harmed others, but that's life – you want to win a race, you need to be able to turn the board.
On the day, the wind hovered around 7 – 8 knots fairly consistently, with a slight peak in the middle of the tests, though not enough to impact the results too significantly.
We had initially planned to run 8 paddlers, but a couple of late withdrawals meant we had more boards than paddlers for each round or run. We weighed each paddler before the test began and measured their height. We established an order for the paddlers to go out, with no more than two paddlers on the course at any time to ensure clean, flat water and no wake. The two paddlers on the course staggered their starts by about a minute. In between each round or run, every paddler had approximately 10 minutes to rest before their next run. The boards were drawn randomly for the paddlers in each subsequent run (board names pulled from a hat).
The entire test took about 3 hours. The weather was fairly mild and not a factor in terms of dehydration or fatigue.
The boards used were:
Fanatic Fly Race Carbon 27” – 12kg
Fanatic Fly Race Carbon 30” – 13kg
Naish Glide Carbon 30” – 14kg
Naish Javelin Carbon 28” – 13kg
Coreban Alpha Race Carbon 29” – 10kg
Starboard Race Carbon 27.5” – 12kg
Starboard Race AST 31.5” – 17kg
Starboard New/Ace AST 25.5” – 16kg
Note that all of these boards are pure production boards – no custom designs, no prototypes, no pre-production demo boards and no team rider light-weight specials. The last two boards listed were AST construction whereas all others were carbon. This is clear in the weights measured, and had a definite impact upon times. Ideally we would have liked to have tested all carbon boards, but there were no available carbon boards for these sizes.
The weight of boards quoted was conducted using bathroom scales on the beach at the end of the session. The boards were wet during this weigh in, and contained the fin used during the test. The measurement was rounded to the nearest kg.
To view the full report, and view the results, visit the SUP VIC Website here:
www.supvic.com/sup-vic-rps-board-tests-20112012/
