"I think there is no limit in design and creation, and this is what I like the most” 

Fantastic acid

Mr.Mausse & the convex life

The power of narcotics is their ability to effortlessly take your mind places it would otherwise never, ever reach on its own. Whether it’s zoning out to take the aerial view, pulling in to explore the rabbit hole or pancaking to broaden your horizon.

While the trick to it, is to maintain a modicum of control; to not spin out, slip sideways or fully wipe out into a catatonic state… Successfully riding out of mind-land inevitably leads to two things. A subtly altered personality is one, and that most horribly beautiful thing, which is probably also the reason you are reading this, is the other: addiction.

Quite easily one of the most intriguing players in the field of foam & fiberglass right now is Mr.Fantastic Acid, aka Tristan Mausse. After travelling the world working as a laminator in a large number of glassing shops around the globe, Tristan tripped and tumbled into his own addiction... The convex bottomed surfboard, aka displacement hull. There’s nothing like the feeling of surfing a‘hull’: this ball-bearing, weightless speed, effortless projection up and down the face of a wave. Perfect trim without breaking a sweat. Like being shot into space, freefalling in a dream, or an endless orgasm.

Funnily enough, Tristan’s own acid drop into exploring the convex bottom was inspired by the original planing hull - some mini-simmons shapes by Joe Bauguess and Jeff Mccallum back in 2007 - and tuning into that design and its fins. Encountering original Liddle hulls after that made sure he’d be chasing the white rabbit indefinitely. Flash forward fourteen years, and the man has his own Biarritz based surfboard brand Fantastic Acid, published three books about surfboard design, some hully film material and a whole range of handcrafted flex fins and hand shaped surf craft (mostly displacement-, some planing hulls). Right on.

Well that’s quite enough fancy prose for now, so let’s talk some actual surfboards! Also for readability’s sake, let’s just call those displacement hull boards by the name of ‘hull’ from here on out. (Unless you love to read the word displacement for a million times over after this. Your call…)

So the Fantastic Acid lineup transitions from craft inspired by mid-sized late 60s and 70s hull designs - his Stubby, Rounded- & Paralleller Hull, through some more extreme ones from the 80s and ending in pretty scintillating post-modern shapes like his Speed Hull, Antistatic Hull and his farm fresh Parlementia Hull. A bigger-wave hull you say? Yeah, it’s a thing. To add some extra sugar to the panache, Tristan has also become an expert at integrating flex tails into these various shapes. As if things weren’t outlandish enough… To be able to functionally comprehend the flex tail’s workings though, we gotta gas up the Delorean and do a little back-to-the-future: to 1965 and the Greenough Spoon.

Flex.

The perfect adaptive surfboard?

The concept of a flexing tail section has to do with variable rocker. Why? George Greenough’s groundbreaking spoon shaped kneeboards featured a very specific centerline rocker, nicknamed the Knuckle. Basically, from tail to nose, the first ⅔ of a board’s bottom had a completely flat rocker, ending in an aggressive rocker break at the front ⅓. That break turned the nose of a board upwards, preventing it from ‘pearling’, or nosediving once the back section started planing and lifting the tail upwards when gaining speed. It’s a defensive design feature. That same flat and wide back section however made the board very difficult to turn, as it doesn’t naturally ‘fit’ into the shape of a wave. Greenough solved this by removing all the foam from its tail

section glass shell (and from the center too by the way, but hey kneeboarders are mad right?), which allowed the tail to massively flex with the wave’s shape when turning, while it straightened out and returned to its original rocker when coming out of the turn. Pretty much like a flex fin that bends & stiffens again when applying pressure.

No breaking wave is the same though, so to do a flex tail right means adjusting stiffness, width and shape of that glass layup for various conditions and shapes. The perfect adaptive surfboard.

A shaper/glasser’s dream and nightmare at the same time. Like a perfectly barrelling closeout.

The funny thing about traditional hull shapes is, when keeping to that Knuckle rocker mentioned above, the actual bottom shape does something completely opposite. Meaning from front to back, the first ⅔ are bellied, or convex shaped. While the back ⅓ section is flat. The round bottom front part ‘grabbing’ the water and all its energy to provide that gloriously smooth & speedy hull surfing weirdness, and the flat tail allowing all that aqua some release again. So you can still turn and firmly drive your stick around corners.

If you take all this applied design theory into the bay though, there’s just so many variables going on at once… how do you stay in control? We spoke to Tristan about these intricacies. Here we go.

Us: So, about torsional tails and flex tails in general: super time consuming to craft and really tricky to get right for the right wave type & surfer . Should shapers stay away from them, or diveright in?

Mr.Mausse: Yes, this is a lot of work!!! A lot of time into the factory for building those, but also in the water to understand how to work the flex, when to use it, and how to use it. To make a perfect flextail you need to feel it yourself while surfing, so you guess which points on the tail to make stronger. The first flex tails I made in Bali were too flex for the Indonesian waves, I had to re-sand it, and re-patch it somewhere on the tail . To make it stiffer. Then the first flex tails I rode in France in soft waves were too stiff and not enough flex… you know what I mean, there is one flextail for one wave! It’s a science… but you know, once you got the good flextail and you know approximately in which conditions you can use it then it’s amazing! And so for that I would recommend any shapers to try it! But of course like I said, if you try to shape one just one time to

experiment, it might be not enough… and you might do a bad flextail… it’s a science you need to study and experiment yourself to be able at the end to make the perfect flextail.

The Progressive Modern Hull, or PMH:

“So the idea was just to keep a rounded bottom shape somewhere on the board… but then I could use the outline of a fish, and the rails of a 60’s gun… or whatever..”

Progression .

Asking Tristan about this new hull paradigm and the way he solves design dualities in, for instance, his Progressive Modern Hull or PMH, this is what follows.

Us: Your PMH shape is like you describe it yourself: a hull with more back foot control, enabling the rider to draw more'contemporary' lines. You mention Ted Spencer's stubbies and White Kite: do you feel this design move also retraces Wayne Lynch's steps in any way? Pulling back wide points, shorter outlines and wanting more back foot control to surf more vertically…

Mr.Mausse: Yes Exactly, and it’s the same period, Wayne Lynch and Ted Spencer were surfing together and specially during the making of EVOLUTION. The word speaks for himself, Evolution — Progressive Modern… you know…!

It’s that period which interested me. They were trying to have a more radical style of surf, but the boards were still full of character. The rockers of the boards, the volumes… it was all what we needed… And you can find that combination only during the transitional era. And so it’s what I tried to design but people in general (and Wayne Lynch himself) forgot that era or think now the designs are not performant enough… but honestly, look at those Wayne Lynch cutbacks in EVOLUTION… I have never seen anyone cut back like those…

Right. Okay, so here’s two things going on at once in Tristan’s process. One is a very focussed design approach to grab from solid surfing heritage that which performs, recreate it, tune it and ride it.

The second one is a firm drive to progress these design elements by experimenting, evolving, test driving & documenting until you drop. Pretty scientific. Continuous integration, not unlike software development. But with a single goal in mind: ‘performance’ boards, without losing that special hull feeling. He puts it this way.

Us: Alright let's dive deeper: design progression. As a shaper, do you feel a fundamental need to progress and evolve board designs towards some unknown point of 'perfection'? Or is there some kind of horizon - especially - for displacement hulls, and is optimizing currently existing shapes for wave type and specific surfer's physique enough of a challenge to get right? (red: kind of a creative designer v.s. craftsman juxtaposition…)

Mr.Mausse: Yes, for myself I think there is no limit in design and creation, and this is what I like the most. At the beginning when I started to shape Displacement hulls and to focus my shaping on those designs, I was just trying to explore the already complex world of the convex bottom surfboards, but that’s all. I was following the rules of the hulls design, same outlines, fins, fin placement, rockers….

But after having mastered that, I was ready to open my mind, and to break the rules! BUT while keeping the same goal! Keeping the same desire of feeling that you feel with a proper displacement hull, but just using a different way to access that goal. So I started trying different and new things, melting pots of design, dynamics, modernity, antique… and just giving birth to something I had in my head.

So the idea was just to keep a rounded bottom shape somewhere on the board… but then I could use the outline of a fish, and the rails of a 60’s gun… or whatever. Once you’ve explored one of those ways, you can still mix it with the technical theory of what is known since ages… and then you might get a magic surfboard… but to get to that point it will take you years. and years and tons of energy.

Antistatic Hull with ultra-high aspect & extremely foiled and raked flex fin. A full convex displacement hull bottom shape. Narrower outline and pintail, to be ridden in powerful and overhead waves.

Hulls for the people

Now all this is fun and games, but what’s in it for the average Joe Hull? You, me and that guy who’s always snaking you on Sunday mornings.

So let’s ask the shaper what he’s actually riding himself as a daily hull… that usually does the trick.

Mr.Mausse: I ride all my shapes everyday, no preferences, I just take the good board for the good waves, but I’m mostly surfing almost everyday and maybe surfing one different model per day.

Okay so that didn’t help much… but we get the man’s gist. There’s this persistent myth about hulls that they only ride well on perfectly peeling points on clean days. However the very existence of the Fantastic Acid quiver debunks that in one smooth stroke. Meaning there’s an everyday hull for everyone: you can throw his Progressive Modern Hull, a Paralleller Hull, classic Stubby or even Rounded Hull into any shifty beach break or onshore local and you’ll have a blast. A massive blast.

“I’m most of the time telling people « It’s wrong, you don’t need to be only in Malibu or Rincon… to surf a displacement hull » every board gets better in perfect conditions… but you can surf a hull on a beach break, even if it’s a short wave you’ll still have that feeling of the ball rolling, and the speed, and the smoothness… it’s all we want, we want that special feeling… and everybody can have access to that…”

Sure his super bladed EXH Hull or pintailed Antistatic Hull shapes are designed with hollower wave types in mind, but more often than not it’s those days where we dare to ride something seemingly unlikely for that wave or those conditions, that we end up having the most memorable session.

There’s an ideal Acid out there for anyone brave enough to open their surfing minds.

How Fantastic those rides will be? Well, let’s just say it all depends on how much control you’re prepared to lose...