Can wingfoiling remain inclusive?

Not long after the Windsurfer first hit the water in the 1970s, custom equipment upgrades began increasing performance but also cost and skill required. As the gear improved, participation decreased. This had been a continuing trend, that is, until wingfoiling.

Wingfoiling is the first moment in the board sailing genre where someone said, “Hey, maybe we’ve taken things too far.” As board and kite sailing kept trying to kill itself through improvement, wingfoiling takes a step toward slower and simpler. While mastering a foiling board is still not for the beginner, wingfoiling has proven popular.

However, leave it to the racers to keep digging for more, with the Wingfoil Racing World Cup Series offering the platform to further develop the board, mast/foil/fuselage, and wing. Here’s an update from that circuit:

One of the trends in equipment in the past year has been for board sizes to increase. If wingfoil racing is to fulfil its destiny as a future discipline in Olympic sailing competition, the riders are going to have to be able to compete in six to seven knots of wind. One of the ways of promoting earlier foiling is to go for a higher volume board.

Top rider Bastien Escofet explains his own thoughts on board size. “I am using a 5’3 Gong Racer board, so it’s quite long. It’s an 80-litre board and I’m 77kg, so just a little more volume than my weight. I don’t understand exactly the science behind it, but I like the length of the board because it creates more stability through the air. I thought it would have been the opposite, because as we bank the board to windward you’d think the wind would push the nose down, but it’s actually more stable.”

With the expectation that in 2025 the fleet might attempt to race in lighter conditions, Escofet believes that he might even use the 5’6 Gong Race board in softer breeze. This 95-litre board is the one currently being used by fellow team rider from Italy, Francesco Cappuzzo, who weighs more than Escofet.

Where Escofet uses a 5’3 board (160 cm), top women’s rider from Poland, Karolina Kluszczynska uses a 140cm board, custom made by Puls from Poland, with 60 litres of volume.

“I weigh around 60 to 63kg, so my board is slightly less than my weight but it seems to work fine for me. It feels comfortable in the light wind and the strong wind, and I don’t have too much of a struggle to get on the foil in the lighter wind compared with the smaller boards.”

A season or so ago, some riders were racing with boards as small as 35 litters, but Escofet says he’s never going back to tiny sizes.

“I used to freestyle on 35 litres but, wow, I would never ride anything like that now,” he laughs. “Sometimes I have to ride on my teammate’s board. It’s a 55 litre and I hate it. Now when I’m freestyling I’m on a 65 litre and next year I’m thinking of switching to a 72.”

For mast length, Kluszczynska is running a 107cm Chubanga. “It’s the same one I’ve been using for more than a year and I’m quite happy with it,” she says. Escofet on the other hand is using a 109cm Gong mast and expects to switch next season to a 112cm.

As for foils, Kluszczynska has been using the same Chubanga foil set-up for a while and she doesn’t anticipate changing any time soon. “I think it’s 550 square cm on the front and maybe 180 on the tail. Don’t ask me about exact fuselage length but I think 60cm.”

Being the team rider that he is, Escofet is always very aware of the gear that he’s riding as he has to feed back performance and data to the Gong team on a regular basis. “I’m using 540 on the front, same as Francesco, with 180 on the back. The fuselage is about 60 to 61cm, shorter than we have had in past seasons.”

Escofet explains the trade-offs between longer and shorter fuselage lengths: “The fuselage creates a lot of drag, so the shorter fuselage means less drag and more speed, but you lose stability. A longer fuselage is better for controlling pitch and yaw [the up-and-down and side-to-side movements] through the water. So, we have a small winglet on either side of the tail fin which gives you more directional stability.

“We also have a lot of dihedral shape on the front wing which provides more stability compared with a flat shape. On the first version of the foil, we didn’t have enough tail fin angle so it was fast, but at a certain speed it was unstable. So, we added more size to the tail fin, which also meant we had to move the mast 3cm further back to bring it back into balance.”

Regarding the handheld “sail”, the past 12 months have seen the arrival of double-skin wings, otherwise known as double-profile wings. Gong was one of the early brands to pioneer this development with a semi-double-profile wing which immediately demonstrated better speed and better pointing angle on the upwind legs.

This season the top two riders in the men’s fleet – Mathis Ghio (FRA) and Kamil Manowiecki (POL) – have both enjoyed good success with full double-profile wings made by Ozone. However, a new rule is likely to come in for the 2025 season that mandates a see-through window to minimize the enormous blind spot and reduce the likelihood of collisions caused by lack of visibility.

The new window rule will present a design challenge for brands building the full double-skin wings. On the other hand, some of the semi-double-profile wings are already fitted with windows so for them it will be business as usual.

Even though the Ozones have been quite dominant on the men’s circuit in 2024, Escofet claims his semi-double-profile Gong wing gives him good upwind efficiency while providing more feedback and ease of handling.

“Francesco and I are trailing the prototypes which will go into production for next season,” says Escofet. “We have introduced battens which create a lot of rigidity right across the canopy. The battens also enable us to ‘cut off’ the corners of the wing which means less drag [through the water] and we’re reducing the thickness of the tube towards the outer ends.

“I prefer the semi-double-profile because it’s good for starting and better for tacks and gybes [compared with full double-profile]. It feels really powerful and I like this design because you can ‘feel’ the wind more and it’s a bit easier to use downwind.”

Escofet has access to multiple wing sizes ranging from 3.5 square metres through to 6.5 square metres. “If I was forced to only use two wings, for sure it would be the 5.0 and the 6.0,” he says.

Kluszczynska uses Zaoli wings ranging from 4.5 to 6.5 square metres. Currently she is using standard single-skin wings but not for much longer. “The next Zaolis have battens and the double skin and I’m looking forward to testing it. I hope it will bring better upwind speed because that is what I need at the moment, although I think in the women’s fleet mostly it’s our technique rather than the gear that is the most important factor. For me, working on my tacks, my gybes and my board handling is still where I can make the biggest gains.”