Inside the eFoil Integrity Trials: demo boards and real criteria

Announcing a head to head test of every major eFoil is easy. Getting the boards is the hard part, and this episode is an honest look at that unglamorous middle stage, where the project either becomes real or quietly does not.

Getting manufacturers to say yes

Arranging demos turned out to consume far more time than expected. It is never one conversation. You prepare materials, you sell the project, you wait for a reply, then you are passed to somebody’s boss, then that person has requests of their own, interviews, or a guarantee that an episode actually gets made. Most of the major manufacturers have now agreed. One brand’s flagship performance board is confirmed, another is sending two boards including its newest model, and a third has more configurations of its existing platform lined up. One manufacturer has gone quiet after early promise, and one said no outright and was clear that it does not do demo units, which is treated here as an answer worth respecting rather than a reason to keep pestering. Anyone with a contact at a brand that has not responded is asked to nudge them, because the aim is to include everyone.

Demos, not free boards

The skeptics get answered directly. Nobody has been asked to hand over a board for nothing. These are demo units, borrowed for testing, and the reason is arithmetic rather than principle: expecting an independent channel to buy every new pro level race board purely to review it is not sustainable at any realistic subscriber count. If a manufacturer later asks that a board stay on for future episodes, that is welcome, but the request being made is for time on the equipment, not ownership of it.

The coin, and why the criteria stay hidden

Three brass coins are being CNC milled by hand for the trials, in what is cheerfully admitted to be the least efficient way possible to make a coin, a process slow enough that a failed sensor mid job can cost days of milling. One goes to the archive, one to the manufacturer of the winning board, and one to a member of the audience. That last one is deliberately not a lottery. The intention is to award it on merit, to somebody who has actually helped the eFoil community, though the exact mechanism is still being worked out. The judging criteria for the boards themselves are being withheld until testing finishes, for the straightforward reason that a published rubric is a rubric that can be engineered against.

What integrity actually means here

The standard being set is that no board becomes the primary ride unless it earns that place, and that nothing arriving from a manufacturer changes what gets said about it. Being challenged on that is treated as fair game: questioning whether a reviewer is honest is reasonable, and the response is to keep producing evidence rather than take offence. There is also a plain warning attached, which is worth repeating: Verdant Ride will never message you asking for money, and anything that does is a scam.

Subscribe on YouTube Every episode

Keep watching

0:16Lift Foils boards arrive for the Verdant Ride Integrity Trials1:12Flite Ultra L2 eFoil review: what the Integrity Trials test5:40How to win an eFoil race: inside a half mile slalom course14:10eFoil wave riding: coached into a first real wave in Puerto Rico

Browse all 158 episodes