Atomic Banger - 2011

SB-RV Review

I thought I was taking a bit of a gamble taking the Banger out for a spin. For one, 157cm is my normal all-mountain snowboard size, when it comes to freeriding I go for snowboards around the 165cm. Secondly, although it had snowed I wasn’t really sure if there was enough powder to warrant a tapered fish shaped snowboard. Two runs on the Banger and I was blown away the board’s versatility.. but where to start?

Sure the Banger has all of the qualities of a tapered board, edge to edge the Banger is fast, when the snow gets deeper, the nose rides up and any worry of back leg burn is out of the window. There are a couple of neat features on the Banger that set it aside from standard 10mm tapered boards:

Powder Pop Rocker is a fantastic addition to the nose of the Banger. Applying weight through the camber causes transition point from camber to nose kick to move a further 10 cm closer to the front binding. Sure this helps with float, but 10mm of taper and a setback stance (2.5cm) is enough to give you float in all but the stickiest of spring snow; where the Pop Rocker works is the incredible ease in which sharp almost instant short radius carves can be initiated. Now where it gets super techy is that the engineers at Atomic have used a really thin board profile with quadaxial glass and carbon fibre stringers, so the longitudinal flex is about a 6 out of 10 but there is explosive power out of turns in powder and on piste. The quadaxial glass also means that when you’re carving hard on an edge there’s no chance you’ll be slipping out onto your knees or your derrière. The amount of pleasure I had darting in and out of the Zauchensee trees and cruising around the red and blue groomers was immeasurable. My only criticism of the Banger is that by using a Nomex honeycomb in the nose, they’ve stripped any natural damping, and with the Pop Rocker, you get a nose that chatters when the speed is cranked up. However, because the start of each effective edge is raised off the snow when the Pop Rocker is loaded it doesn’t feel sketchy, it just vibrates like Rolf Harris’s wobble board.

Intermediate to advanced snowboarders looking for a great value powder specific snowboard that won’t constrict them to deep powder off-piste, is agile between trees, stable off drops and straight lining and a load of fun just shredding the pistes should check out the Banger, it’s a must have. In my opinion, the Banger is the board that bridges the gap between powder board and freeride shred, the perfect freeride board in a two board quiver…. pure class!

Posted by Rich Ewbank in • Atomic