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The Tango arrived in the CrazyFly Range a few years back to complement the Sculp. It’s a 3 strut kite with squarer tips and with its eyes on the high performance freeride market. It is pitched as being as happy in the surf as it is in the air and to have the features that more experienced riders need to really get the most out of their riding.
For 2017, construction of the Tango has moved to CrazyFly’s new facility in Slovakia, allowing the team to keep a close eye on the production process and to implement design updates that simply aren’t possible at the larger factories. With this in mind, as soon as you unwrap the kite you notice some ‘fresh’ features. The connection of the canopy to the leading edge is closer, giving you a really taught connection, the struts are attached to the canopy with two seams rather than one improving rigidity here, and the wingtips have a solid Dacron panel to improve reactivity and durability. It is great to see some new ‘out of the box’ approaches to design and, whether they all stay in the range or not, it is much easier for them to try these things out with their own factory, and it’s good to see that innovative mindset. Other changes include a new fixed bridle, and overall the kite is 10% lighter with the obvious performance gains that this brings.
On the water and it is immediately clear that the kite’s performance has been turned up a notch for 2017. We felt that the main reason for this was the new bridle which gives a super connected feel, and although it is hard to quantify the effect of the new design innovations, the fact is that this now feels like a responsive kite which reacts immediately to input at the bar. For boosting you can really whip it through the window and it delivers a surprisingly gutsy amount of initial lift, but then quite a floaty feeling through the air. We had the 10.5m which would loop but we would prefer to try out the smaller sizes for that. And for unhooked moves the Tango is stable and lets you get on with things here. In the surf, the Tango feels nimble and like a relatively ‘light’ kite. We had some sessions in onshore conditions and found that it turned well and had enough drift to enable you to get on with riding the wave.
In a sentence: It has been great to see the Tango evolve over the last few years into what it is now: a solid all-rounder with additional performance on tap.
