Recently, we encountered the rare and exclusive Venturi skateboard. You may have seen it in the Forums –it’s the brainchild of Peter Sanftenberg, the designer of the carbon-fiber RollsRolls boards, and he recently had one with him on a trip to SoCal. We had an opportunity to chat with Peter about the design, to shoot some pics for you and to ride it a little. More recently, we had another opportunity to ride the Venturi, but with another setup that we’d never have thought of, but that we loved. This deck has some surprises, and here’s our report.
 The Venturi is designed by Sacha Lakic and built by Peter Sanftenberg’s production facility, entirely out of carbon fiber. It bears engraved plates, indicting which of the 200 produced you’re holding, and they call it the “Black Feather”. The name makes sense: it’s amazingly light, even with the Randals and 85mm Kryptos you see on it here. Using a prototypical method with carbon fiber, the internals of the deck aren’t solid—it’s hollow and corrugated within. The result is a stiff, light deck that weighs less than a kilo (2.2lb), but that Peter maintains is even stronger than his engineered RollsRolls deck. When we first seized upon it at SlideFest, we nearly tossed it over our head –expecting it to weigh similar to our own speedboards.  Venturi specs this rig with a weird truck setup that might come more from Lakic than from Sanftenberg: the version on the website uses an RII 180 up front and a 150 out back. This combination might look good, but it’s exactly opposite from what you might want to do if you were going to ride this baby as fast as it looks. In Oceanside, Peter had 180’s on both ends of the deck. It came without griptape, other than a narrow stripe down the center of the deck. We thought that was “pretty”, but deadly-looking.  The deck has a little flex, under a 230lb rider, but doesn’t feel too rigid under a 165lb skater, either. It does feel fast and light, to anyone. When we saw this deck again, at the PumpStation slalom races, it had an entirely new personality: now it’s wearing Revenge trucks and more grip tape. This deck’s owner is Mike Allen, the representative for RollsRolls in the USA. It’s an un-numbered deck from the first run, so don’t look for the engraved plate. Mike’s added some grip tape and swapped the torsion trucks for the Randals. Hey, this looks great, but does it work? It seems to! A line formed to ride the Venturi, and Mike was cool enough to let several riders check out the deck. Grins resulted and the Revenges are tall enough that there’s no real risk of hanging a rail on rough pavement.  We didn’t get enough time on this board, in either session, to really evaluate its behavior beyond the level of a “parking lot test”, but we’re surprised and intrigued by the short look we’ve had. Is it too pretty, too fragile and therefore destined to hang on the walls of million-dollar condos in Beverly Hills, New York, Vancouver or Monaco? Is it a cutting-edge forebear of things to come in composite design? Peter has suggested he’ll send one out to the Longboard Consortium, so we may very well report back to you again on this one.  In the meantime, check out these $561.00 beauties at VenturiBoards.Com . |
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