2013-14 will be the Burton Parkitect’s second season. It comes carrying quite a rep, with both jibbing Jeremy Jones, an old hand, and Zak Hale, one of Burton’s new generation of rail riders, proclaiming themselves fans. As you’d expect from a board with that kind of backing, this has a strong freestyle focus and a whole range of features designed to make park riding a piece of piss.

Like the vast majority of freestyle boards this has a true twin shape, a medium flex and a fairly wide waist for extra stability. It also boasts their ‘squeezebox’ technology, with the bits of the core around the bindings made thicker than normal to add extra pop. Unlike the Burton Custom though, the Parkitect has ‘off-axis squeezebox’, meaning the thickened sections are at asymmetric angles of +15 and -15 degrees. The idea is that this mirrors the typical park rider’s duck-footed stance, so the thickened sections will be as effective as possible. Burton have also made the ‘frostbite edges’ asymmetric on this board, setting them at similar angles. These are the bulges underneath the bindings that give extra edge-hold.

This of course means that shredders who don’t like duck-footed stances will struggle to get the most out of this board. But the off-axis tweaks are definitely popular with the its target market – our freestyle loving testers rated the board’s “excellent edge grip” and said it felt “powerful and snappy”. Interestingly while the camber profile gives the board plenty of pop, our tester said “you’d have to know what you’re doing to take this on rails – it’s not a noodly rocker board by any means”. The trade-off of course is that this is stable enough to straight- line into serious-sized booters. The graphic apparently shows groupies gathering round you after you’ve stomped said serious-sized booters.

Buy this board at: ss20.com, subvertboardstore.com sputniksnowboardshop.com 

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