Outline

Narrower pulled in longboard nose, widest point pulled back into a hip flyer, rounded pin. The benefit of pulling the widest point back is you get a long nose and a short tail, so the tail resembles a shorter board. When you stand on the tail to turn, it really does feel like you’re on a shorter board. Combined with the hip/flyer it does incredibly tight back foot snaps, gets vertical easily and hooks under the lip.

Rails

Standard profile. A lot of boards at this length assume the rider needs extra float and generally come with thicker rails which are harder to bury and have less sensitivity. The 8 Ball’s rails are relatively refined, even more in the tail, so it feels more like the backend of a high performance shortboard.

Rocker

Full high performance rocker. With this amount of rocker the board fits nicely into tighter parts of the wave, it prefers being pumped for speed, instead of someone waiting for it to build its own momentum. It also likes a tight cutback at speed along with throw type maneuvers, where you may be going slow, but you can still throw the board up to the lip.

Bottom

Flat bottom. The idea is to keep the board going fast, it already has plenty of features to keep the board loose and sensitive, no need for added contours as the overall design is not dependent on bottom contours for control. Additionally the general Sunova construction with the flexible bottom adds another dimension that reduces the need for contours. 

Deck

Standard. Not much going on here apart from thickness distribution. Having the nose and tail quite refined reduces swing weight and keeps the tail feeling sensitive and flexy.

Fins

Thruster. For sure the best performance option, I personally like to run a slightly smaller tail fin, as this frees the tail up a little better in tight under the lip style turns and snaps in general.

A high performance 8ft board that paddles long and surfs short.