Porsche Pushes Big Wave Surfboard Performance To The Limits At Nazare
The Nazare Big Wave Challenge has been given the green light to run on Monday, January 22. Among the big-wave surfers in the draw is world record holder Sebastian Steudtner. In October of 2020 the German surfer broke the world record for biggest wave ever ridden with a monstrous 86-footer at Nazare in Portugal. In an effort to ride the mythic 100-foot wave, Steudtner and car maker Porsche, along German autoparts specialist Schaeffler, are collaborating on the development of a faster surfboard that will hopefully allow Steudtner to break his own record.
"With the world record wave I realized I've reached a limit for how fast my board can go," Steudtner explained to French news agency AFP.
“Together with Porsche, we asked ourselves how we could make the board faster and more stable,” he continued. “Speed is so important to us because the bigger the wave, the more speed I have to have to get away from it. The power of the wave is an absolute force, like having several buildings pushing you.”
“Through changes to the board and altering Sebastian’s stance, we were able to reduce air resistance by 20 percent,” Markus Schmelz, a project manager at Porsche, told AFP.
The board they’ve engineered has reportedly “made the board faster and more stable at high speeds.” Colored yellow and black, the new design has been completed and now it’s just a matter of time for a truly giant day, presumably at Nazare, for Steudtner to bust it out and see what happens.
