Slingshot

Foil, wing and board brand with kiteboarding roots — the single most-featured gear maker across the catalogue, covered from the top down and across its design team.

• CEO/founder Jeff Logosz on where Slingshot came from and is going (Ep 127); the ONELOCK mast & fuselage system with product designer Bobby Johnston (Ep 102); wing/parawing/board design with Gabriel Verrier-Paquette (Ep 119).
• Riders/ambassadors: Fred Hope (Ep 84, and the “Project Drag” board programme Ep 144) and Sam Light, marketing lead in the UK (Ep 41).
• Edo Tanas joins Slingshot from F-One (Ep 139). The hosts visited Slingshot’s Hood River offices (Ep 84, Ep 127).
• Project Drag (Ep 144): a collaborative board-and-mast programme built around a Tuttle (“total”) connection, handing design to outside shapers Ken Adgate and Kyle Touhey plus a Tuttle-box builder (“Michael”). Notable for a public Discord and factory-level transparency, a compressed ~6-month dev cycle, paying to industrialise the Tuttle box for other brands (Hydrocraft already buying), and a 17mm high-stiffness mast in development. Pitched at the top ~10–20% of riders; ~$1,800 boards. Mike Zajcik and Johnny Heineken fed back informally.
• 2026 downwind racing (Ep 147): new signing Edo Tanas won the season’s first race on F4 foils, not Slingshot’s (they hadn’t developed a downwind foil in time) — and Slingshot released a candid video saying so, which split community opinion.
• Origin of OneLock (Ep 84, Fred Hope’s first sit-down, recorded at Slingshot’s Hood River office during AWSI): the screwless connection started ~3 years earlier as a fix for two practical problems — corrosion on the older Phantasm aluminium fuselage (dependent on the factory’s aluminium QC) and fiddly beach setup for less dexterous/older customers. Only once in development did the team realise how much drag the screws were adding, which pushed the geometry toward a fully streamlined, non-bulbous foil. Getting the carbon collar thin enough cost roughly 50 broken masts and several expensive mold retools; first physical sample came 1.5–2 years before Ep 84.
• Current track system is RTS (Rapid Track System) — front teeth plus rear flags — which Fred says still adds drag versus OneLock; he expects plate/track systems generally to start disappearing within ~3 years but says a shared cross-brand standard needs industry-wide buy-in, not a single brand acting alone (Ep 84).
• 2024 product notes (Ep 84): Slingwing V5 (building on the NXT), Cod V2/NXT in the Big Air new-school series, and the Laser — a light-wind wingboard that doubles as a downwind board, with tail volume deliberately kept clear of the mast to preserve pumping. Fred names the minimalist Hobie/Hopecraft Joystick and UFO kite-foiling gear as what he’s proudest of alongside OneLock.
• The OneLock name itself was a deliberated internal decision built from two concept “columns” — security and speed — with Slipstream, Impossible, Fast Latch and Quick Lock rejected along the way (Ep 84).

Ripple additions (batch 2, 2026-07-20)

• Tiesda You (Starboard, Ep 110) name-checks Slingshot’s ‘One Lock’ (designed by Bobby Johnston) as UCS’s closest open-standard peer.
• Ep 38 (Armie Armstrong): a Slingshot Dart features in a Freddie anecdote (Antigua) about the board leaking and folding mid-session — both hosts caveat this isn’t a knock on the brand generally.