When you just can't seem to forget the time you slid out in that dreaded hairpin and explored the ditch while watching the rest of the pack streak past smiling and waving at you. When you keep finding yourself standing on the second step, not the top of the podium, it starts to get to you.The Firefly is different from almost anything else on four wheels for many reasons, but it's form comes from it's racing pedigree. Designed by a committee of genuine racers on very steep, very fast roads around Seattle, Washington, this board exists because those who want to win made it so.
Rather than being penned by a sole architect working alone under a 100 watt bulb, this board lives because dedicated downhill junkies had to have it.
In fact, they demanded it.
When some of the fastest speedboarders in the world, including the likes of Shane Donogh, Editor of Northwestlongboarding.com and Team Insect's Jeremy Geier line up shoulder to shoulder in your shop with their helmets hanging from their hands and ask for a board to make them drive better and win more often, you really ought to grab a notebook and start scribbling.
Well, Steve Hopper of Insect Skateboards did just that, and after an infinite number of hours of negotiation, testing, building and destroying prototypes, and hauling Firefly decks to dozens of
actual races, the Insect team has created what they believe is the best thing to ride when you want to take home the cup, and not just a ribbon.The jet black, 40-inch long, topmount stealth bomber you see here is their baby. It has some immediately obvious features, including a 3 position adjustable wheelbase, full cutouts front and back for no chance of deadly wheelbite, deep concave, and a touch of rocker toward the nose. Motion Boardshop's Trevor Preston says that the concave on the Firefly is like "standing in a bathtub".
But Insect's owner and chief scientist Steve Hopper isn't the kind of guy to bang out a plank that works and sit back on his laurels. He set out to improve the design in two fundamental ways. He wanted it to be lighter and thinner than any other board out there, and he wanted it to be just as strong or stronger than a traditional wood core board. Enter the microscopic carbon building blocks called 'nanotubes'.
Carbon nanotubes are the strongest and stiffest materials yet discovered in terms of tensile strength and elastic
properties. In 2000, a multi-walled carbon nanotube was tested to have a tensile strength of 63 gigapascals (GPa). Under high pressure, nanotubes merge together like the strands in a rope, producing strong, unlimited-length wires through high-pressure linking of the tubes. Insect is the one of the first companies on earth to utilize this material, and the only company using it to make longboards. The response has been overwhelmingly positive.
This unassuming black board is turning up at races with increasing frequency, and Insect is now so committed to the material, they're building every board in their line out of it. This means casual riders, slalom fiends and go-fast officionados on your block can experience for themselves the performance of next generation skateboard design alongside some of the world's fastest, most determined speedboarders alive today.
The Insect Firefly, built for speed by those who live it.
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