2011 Hyperlite Franchise Wakeboard Review

What up, guys. I’m Jimmy LaRiche, sitting here with my Hyperlite 2011 pro model, the Franchise.  I’m super pumped with how it came out. Me and Nelson worked really hard last Winter on coming up with a board that was good for someone that was starting out or someone at a pro level. We knew right away that we wanted to develop a ride that was friendly for everybody, and so we went with a continuous rocker on this Franchise for 2011. The unique part about the Franchise Board is our tapered channels. The channels and the fin that sits on top of that channel narrows toward the tip and the tail of that board. And as the rider approaches the wave, with that channel and the fin kicked up like this, it pulls it, tail to board, deeper in the water, giving you a bigger pop off the wake, no matter what size wake your riding behind. A good smooth ride and super poppy. When you’re edging really hard into the wake and you’re landing really hard in the flats, you’re going to have the dual spine under the board that’s basically going to break up your landing and make it soft for you. And it’s not going to slow down when you land in the flats, it’s going to keep its speed through the wake and through its landing. That was one of the big features I wanted to hit on, and we nailed it.

From tip to tail, on the Franchise, we went with a sharp edge, and what that does is, it keeps the board nice and fast on top of the water, and then, on the bottom of the board, we’ve got two raised landing areas.  When I was watching Jimmy ride or should I say fly, he never landed dead-flat on the water. He was coming down off of his tricks, he was either landing on one edge, continuing to edge outside, or the other edge. So what we did was, we put a soft landing spine on either side of the board. So no matter what edge he was landing on, he had a nice soft landing. Jimmy definitely wanted a slider base on the bottom of his board. he hits a lot rails these days and he wanted something that would hold up. We went through a lot of testing with different bases, and we ended up with the Enduro base. It’s perfect, you don’t even know it’s there. You can hardly feel the texture on it, but it works really well. It doesn’t slow you down on the rails. After a full day of riding rails, you barely even know that you did, there’s no scratches on the bottom. It holds up really well. Overall, the Franchise is a very simple board, easy to ride. It has a lot of features that are going to make riding really fun for you, great pop off the wake, soft landings, an increased edge hold with our tapered channels. And overall, the board has a very thin profile, so the swing-weight is reduced greatly and you can spin as fast as you want to spin. We are stoked with how this board turned out this year, and we love the graphic. We know you’ll love it, it rides like a Cadillac! Click here to check out our full line of Hyperlite Gear.