Glide Wax Testing in the non-fluoro era

Before the ban on fluoro glide waxes I owned a glide wax formulary that I built myself. This formulary categorized snow and track conditions using things such as snow grain size, age, temperature, and moisture content, and even such things as purity (clean new, older and pollen or dust, spring type with a lot of visible dirt). For each category there was a list of up to three waxes in a ranking of speed. These rankings were only arrived at after years of testing, and a #1 wax might not be the actual fastest on a particular day, but historically was never worse than third, and would always be competitive in most regional races. For more important races, the rankings showed the waxes most likely to win a test and this made testing to find the most competitive wax a much easier process.

Now I’m back at the data collection period with the ever expanding choices of non-fluoro glide waxes and it will be a long time before a new formulary can be built.

But some things are becoming clear.

One of the more glaring discoveries was that in the early stages of developing non-fluoro gliders that were race worthy, was that the most expensive products rarely delivered performance that was in line with their high price. Sometimes the difference between a top-line “race” glider was not much better than the companies low tier products.

Fortunately, marketplace competition has been bringing better products to our needs. And in some conditions - newer, cleaner, cleaner snow - performance has become impressive. Compared to fluorocarbon waxes, the challenge has been in wet snow and/or dirty snow, and longer distances.

The picture shows a sample of some recent tests in wet old snow that was relatively clean. Look carefully and in the background was one test using fluorocarbon waxes. It was pleasing that all of the tested products produced competition level speed with only minor differences. Yes, the fluoro paraffin and fluoro powder topcoat was the fastest, but not by as much as one would think. But this test had an unusual component.

Most testing is done by a glide-out test, which is objective in nature. If two or more winners are found (as in this test) the glide-out test is followed by skiing on them for best “feel”, especially on uphills. In this test the non-fluoro winner of the glide-out was the Rode W.C. 62 with RW50 topcoat, but the very close Rex NFX41 with the liquid NF11 top had a better feel. The unusual aspect of this test was that these were all re-tested after skiing 15 kilometers.

This is where things became interesting.
The Fluoro gliders (Star VF2 with F15 powder) did not lose much speed at all and was still extremely fast, while the Rode lost a signficant amount of speed and was now disappointingly slow, while the Rex combo, while displaying noticeable speed loss, was still somewhat competitive.

So was this a fair test?

Not really. In regards to speed durability, one thing is becoming clear in this non-fluoro glide wax era. That is the use of extra-hard initial base layers, in this case the Rex NFX41.

A long ways out until a formulary can be made, but for sure what we can say now is that these very hard base layers do indeed make a very big contribution to speed durablity. We’re often finding that in addition to use as a first layer that mixing these with the primary glide paraffin can bring even better results.

Here’s a list of some of our favorite base layers.

Rode: Endurance, R100G Graphite

Star: Durable (powder or liquid)

Swix: Marathon White, Marathon Black

Rex: NFX00 Sisu White or Sisu Black. Sisu Racing Base Glider