Note: We have a great opportunity to pick skis for individual customers at Rossi through Friday.  We have a very limited availability of Rossi World Cup production available for $950, and we are also picking regular production X-ium WCS Skate and Classic for the normal price of $650.  If you are interested in having us hand-select a pair for you while we are here, please fill out our ski request form now.  Due to the time difference, we need these no later than 5pm Thursday, June 24 in the US.

We have reached the final leg of our Euro trip and we are now visiting the Rossignol headquarters in France through the end of the week.  Located just outside of Grenoble, the Rossi world headquarters are home to the offices for marketing, product development, racing and accounting as well as the race factory where they build all of the World Cup Race Product and all development for cross-country, alpine and snowboard takes place.

US Nordic Manager Robert Lazzaroni met us this morning to give us the tour of the facility and then we spent most of the day with the Biathlon Racing Manager, Pierre Heinrich.  The facility itself is impressive and was designed when Rossignol was owned by Quicksilver and money was flowing freely.  Rossignol moved into the space last April, after Quicksilver sold Rossignol and Rossi scaled back the original plans for the site.  The entire building is rounded and smooth, with amazingly well-designed spaces that blend open-air offices with many enclosed meeting rooms that surround the office space.  The Race and Product Development Factory takes up about 1/3 of the entire building and is a hive of activity with production and development happening concurrently.

Pierre took us through the cross-country race production, and we saw a lot of the same things we've seen at Fischer, Madshus and Atomic, but every brand has unique methods and materials, so it is always interesting to learn each company's unique approach to building skis.  Rossignol uses Nomex honeycomb cores in its skis, and wraps the Nomex with a thin lamination of wood on the sides and bottom.  The wood gives stability to the core material, which then undergoes milling in CNC machines that precisely mill the three-dimensional shape of the ski.  One interesting difference between Rossi construction and others we have seen is that the Rossignol cores are built with camber in them, while both Fischer and Madshus cores are milled flat, then bent into shape in the mold.  While most of the "strength" of the ski still comes from the carbon- and glass-fiber laminations that go on top of the core, the core itself is contributing to the ski's flex and camber.

Like other brands of skis, the ski is put together in a mold that binds the base, the core, the edge, a special layup of laminations and the top sheet.  Each length and stiffness of ski has its own unique makeup in terms of core shape and laminations laid on top of the core to give it the desired flex and camber.  The component parts are laid into the mold, glue is injected, and the mold is closed and placed in a press where high pressure is applied and the skis are "cooked" until they are complete.  Rossi uses molds that create a pair of skis with each cycle, where other brands are building one ski at a time in their molds. 

These molds and presses are impressive. The molds are large, precisely-machined 3-dimensional metal pieces that are very expensive to produce.  The presses are set to specific shapes using different methods at each manufacturer, but typically they define shape by making a precise adjustment every cm or so down the length of the ski.  The molds have to be adjusted by hand and calibrated frequently so that the skis come out with smooth lines and the exact shape the engineers are trying to achieve.  We toured through this part of the factory just as the molding guru was adjusting the press.  We stood around and talked about the molds for about 15 minutes as he painstakingly adjusted and measured each point on the mold.  He made it about ¼ of the way down the length of the mold while we were there.

One of the interesting tidbits we learned was that Rossignol created a new temperature control system in the new facility that keeps the temperature of the molds much more tightly controlled and it has increased their production quality noticeably from their previous facility.

Once the ski has baked for 20 min or so, it is removed from the mold.  The raw ski has unfinished edges that need to be milled away to achieve the finished product and the groove(s) must also be milled in the ski and it has to be stone ground. 

Rossi engineers painstakingly check the final product's shape and flex using a bundle of tests that measure the precise shape of the ski under different loads, as well as measuring the flex (strength) of the ski every 5cm along its length.  If the ski is not within the tolerances, they make adjustments to the mold/press, build more skis, and then re-run the tests until they get everything dialed in for production.

Once the production has had all of the kinks worked out, the race factory goes into full production, which is limited to about 10 pairs coming out of each mold per day.  From what we saw, they had 4 presses that could be in production at the same time.  Even though this factory is only for world cup race production and prototypes, the number of skis they produce in each batch is extremely limited.  With the precision and care they take to make these skis, combined with the limited production capacity, these World Cup race skis are fabulously expensive to make.  All of the "regular" production skis are made in a Rossignol factory in Spain, where they take the materials, machines and methods perfected in the R&D lab into high-volume production.

At the end of the tour, Pierre showed us the tests they run on the skis and how they pick skis for the World Cup.  He also highlighted the differences they see between what is working for World Cup skiers and the regular ski racing world.  Most elite competitions are run on highly compacted and sometimes chemically modified snow surfaces and World Cup athletes are supremely fit and running at very high speeds.  Loppet racers tend to be not as superhumanly fit, are generally skiing on softer tracks at lower speeds and are not as technically proficient as World Cup skiers.  For these reasons, they tweak the world cup racing skis to provide the fastest materials for World cup racers, while making the Spanish production skis what they feel is the ideal for the rest of the ski racing world.

We had the opportunity to ski on World Cup production skis a few years ago while testing skis for the US Ski Team skiers on Rossignol, and it convinced us that these were special enough to pursue.  To us, the Rossi World Cup skis have a combination of stiffness and suppleness that create a sublime experience on snow.  Most of the time, skis that are aggressive, springy and stiff are fast on straight-ahead glide tests, but are either tough to kick (classic) or climb poorly (skate).  The World Cup skis combine the speed of a stiff and powerful ski with a supple feel that does not exist anywhere else.

Last year we begged Rossi to sell us 20 pairs of skis from the World Cup production, and this year they were generous enough to let us pick 30 pairs for our customers.  We spent the rest of our day in the race room going through the world cup production skis and picking out what interests us most.  We'll spend Thursday picking skis from Spanish production and then regroup at the race room Friday to finalize the World Cup Ski Picks.