ONE WAX, ALL CONDITIONS.

Since 1972, Hertel has been at the forefront of groundbreaking wax technology. By using surfactants to change the surface tension of water under your ski/snowboard, Hertel has created the only true all temperature wax. Put it on and always have the right wax for the conditions.

Since all our waxes are all temperature, the way to choose between Super HotSauce and Racing 739 is pretty simple. For regular riding, we recommend you try Super HotSauce. It’s slick, easy to apply and gives you more control over your skis/snowboard. Racing 739 is way faster and more expensive. However, it lasts up to seven days, so once you factor that in, cost performance is about the same as Super HotSauce (and you get to go faster!). If your friends are using brand x, get the HotSauce. If your friends are on the HotSauce, get the Racing! If it’s warm spring conditions with dirty snow, get some SpringSolution.

Two big advances in ski wax chemistry—surfactants and fluorocarbons—took place more or less out in the open, and well away from the alpine World Cup circus.

Terry Hertel was a recreational skier from the San Francisco area. He had made some money during Silicon Valley’s computer boom and in 1972 introduced a little electric waxing drum for home use called the Original HotWaxer. To go with it he created a line of waxes. As a Lake Tahoe skier, Hertel was fascinated with the problem of glide in very wet snow. In 1974, on the advice of UC Davis chemistry professor Tim Donnelly, he added a surfactant to his paraffin wax to produce a universal wax he called HotSauce. A surfactant is a wetting agent, the exact opposite of a hydrophobic agent. It shouldn’t have worked. But the stuff Hertel used, sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), is an odd columnar molecule with a hydrophobic end. Its commonly used in toothpaste, shampoo and shaving cream as a foaming agent. Suspended in wax, SDS molecules clump into spheres, called micelles, with the hydrophobic end out, each sphere acting as a water-repellent ball bearing. Hertel said his surfactant ingredient was “encapsulated.” Super HotSauce earned an insiders’ reputation for great glide in heavy snow. Town racers liked it. Hertel could never afford the fees to join the U.S. Ski Team supplier pool, let along send a technician to Europe, but he says he sent some surfactant wax to Europe with the team and is convinced it was an ingredient in the Diann Roffe and Eva Twardokens medals in GS at the Bormio World Championships in 1985.

At around that time, Hertel started looking for a “Spring Solution,” something that would work in very wet snow but repel the pine pollen, diesel exhaust particles and other dirt that darkened the ski slope snow in April and May. He tried polypropylene glycol, a food-grade antifreeze used to keep ice cream from melting, and it worked. But he also talked to , a chemist at 3M, who mentioned that the company sold a liquid fluorocarbon to the cosmetics and paint industries—it dried to a smooth, glossy surface. Thought the liquid fluorocarbon would work well in a ski wax, but warned that at 1,000 per pound, it was far too expensive. This became WhiteGold that won the Olympics documented in 1988 and 1994.

Hertel wound up buying the 3M per-fluorocarbon (PFC) liquid in five-gallon drums, mixed it into a high-strength candle wax called Paraflint, and in 1986 introduced a hard block wax he called Racing 739. It was very hydrophobic, and very fast. (Perfluoro means that all the lateral links in the polymer chain, not just some of them, are capped with fluorine atoms.) Correction, Perfluorpolyeither diol.