GEAR: THE KEY ASSET OF THE HIPE!

It is no coincidence that the HIPE is today the market benchmark for inflatable foil boards. Whether for surfing, kiteboarding, SUP, wing or wake foiling, the HIPE perfectly meets the constraints of each discipline. One of its strengths is its unparalleled rigidity that feeds the countless positive feedback we receive about it. L’Ours shares how it all came together.

   

“When we imagined the HIPE, we had several ideas for effectively combining an inflatable board and a foil. The challenge wasn’t just making this board handy for transport. We wanted the same performance as with a rigid board of equal weight.

The first idea was simply to glue a foil fixing plate under the board, the size of the usual boxes on rigid boards. But we quickly saw that the flex and the twist were very important, to the point of making the sensations of piloting the foil very uneven. So we redesigned the concept as two separate pieces:

• a plate which should stop all the bending and twisting forces.
• a volume which ensured the lift and the shape.

This is how the HIPE was born.    

To reduce the flex to close to zero, a carbon plate was needed that covers the entire stance, from the rear foot to the front foot with the foil in between. The added thickness on the plate combined with this length allowed us to stop all the flex. First victory.

Then we had to remove the twist. Indeed, the feet are not always in the axis of the board, in particular the front foot which is rather placed towards the windward rail. This creates a twist. Typically you press on the port side of the baord and the foil continues to go straight. This induces inertia in the piloting and therefore loss of control. To solve this problem, we widen the carbon plate at the front so that it reaches under the front heel. Thus the plate again takes all the efforts. It is by providing answers to flex and twist that the HIPE has been able to reach a prodigious level of performance for an inflatable structure.”