ShredShox Is Taking A New Approach To Making Your Skis Chatter-Free

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Race car drivers are a funny bunch, tinkering around with unbelievably expensive tools and toys to eke out fractions of a second on a track. It’s no surprise that it’s a tight-knit community where daredevils and nerds put their skills to the test to pursue glory. A decade ago, Ken Nichols and Nick Foster met as engineers and drivers on the racing scene, connecting over their shared love of fast cars and the tech inside of them. Nichols was an avid skier, but Foster, a kid from Southern California, had never skied a day in his life. The duo had an intimate understanding of what allowed a car to go fast around a corner, but wanted to see if they could transfer some of that thinking into making skis smoother, faster, and more predictable.

To them, the answer was obvious: add an element of tunable suspension between the boot and the ski. The two started working on the idea nearly a decade ago under the name ShredShox , using remote-control car shocks, and big, bulky materials to create a system where the ski binding “floated” above the ski on a plate attached by the shocks. This allowed for a significant amount of suspension travel to absorb uneven snow surfaces and impacts without transferring the force directly into the skier’s legs.

Now, after six versions of the system, ShredShox has a suspension system they are ready to talk about and share with the world. The RC car shocks have been replaced by two high-performance mountain bike shocks (similar to what you would find on a lightweight XC or trail bike), that connect the floating carbon fiber binding mount plate to your ski. The system adds about 2.5 pounds of weight to each foot–pretty significant, but then again, heavy skis have always been the dampest, quietest rides anyway.

The system isn’t designed to replace your ski binding, in fact it’s designed to work with most alpine bindings on the market. “We’re not claiming bindings or skis are inadequate–we’re not replacing anyone or saying it’s us over them,” says ShredShox’s Head of Brand Jarrod Krisiloff. “We just want to think outside the box and bring something totally different to the market.”

Who is the target user, you might ask? “The top 5 percent of everyday skiers will probably decide this isn’t for them–they’re fit enough, skilled enough,” says Krisiloff, “but this can be a game changer for the elite class of ski racers, who like race car drivers are looking for any advantage they can find.” Krisiloff also points out that the second user group who would find the product immediately useful are older longtime skiers dealing with injuries or tire quickly and are looking for something to help keep them on the mountain all day long. With skis that take the edge off impacts, allow for a smoother ride, and enable faster, more effortless skiing, why not?

I haven’t had a chance to try the gear yet in person, and look forward to hopefully trying some this year, but Krisiloff describes the sensation as having the system erase whatever is beneath your feet: “I took a run down a very chewed-up Siberia Bowl at Palisades, and it felt like a groomed run.” That was on an already quite-damp Head Kore 87 ski with a super-stiff Salomon S-Pro 130 boot.

This season, ShredShox is going deep into a big testing push, answering the calls of the 525 people who already signed up for a demo. If you see someone sporting some funny-looking bindings in the lift line this year after mobbing down a mogul field, it might just be ShredShox in action.