XBionic BR1 – Bruno Hasulyo’s New Racing Machine Revealed!

Bruno Hasulyo’s secret is out and we at TotalSUP are super proud to have a new exclusive! Bruno Hasulyo teased us all year long with photos and videos shot from his new home in Portugal but also in Barcelona and Switzerland until he won for the 4th time the SUP 11 City Tour in Holland. What better proof of concept for a new race board than averaging just over 10km/h over 230kms (without pushing too hard, should we add?). But even with this, once again, high-profile victory to add to an already very impressive SUP athlete CV, very little has been disclosed to this day about Bruno Hasulyo’s brand new winning machine, the BR1, nor about his business partnership with Swiss sportswear giant Xbionic… until today!

Hi Bruno, you were very secretive about your new project until we found out recently that your name was associated with global high-tech sportswear company, XBionic. Can you let the cat of out the bag for TotalSUP?

​Hello TotalSUPers,  yes, we kept it quite secret as there were many things we wanted to change and innovate.
We started the journey together towards the most innovative high-performance SUP race board and it took some time to create it. And as the BR1 is X-Bionic’s first SUP board, we wanted to be a great surprise for the market and I believe we managed to shake the waters a little. Our board is a true “State of the Art” gliding machine.
We started from scratch and created a board that hopefully will redefine what a SUP race board is.
And now it is ready! The board that i always dreamed of ! Fast, agile , premium and affordable.

 

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Without further ado, can you present the highly-expected X-Bionic BR1 model in details? What role did you have in its design?

​The X-Bionic Br1 is a Performance SUP race board. That was the mentality we kept in front of our eyes when designing it.
The board is 14×22″, it’s a structural hollow race board made with premium materials and YES we are proud of the materials we have used to build it, no lies nor misleading information.
On the website, you can see the % of all components required to build the board. For example, we use approx. 53% carbon, so yes you can expect a real solid and extra stiff board.

 

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Most Important info:

– Weight: Under 10kg
– Dimensions: 14″ x 22″
– The first high-performance super lightweight racing board suitable for everybody, designed and created for efficiency and comfort.
– 6 YEARS OF RESEARCH. TRUE INNOVATION.
– We created an extra wide standing area for a 22” board. Resulting in a very comfortable and stable area.
– The SUP BR1 board is shipped without a fin

We launched this great project with one-size only because we believe that a 22″ wide race board is ideal for most paddlers and I will also be able to have a great performance on it. We focused more on the materials, solutions, and shapes rather than going extra slim to get to the ideal racing speed.

The board is designed for mostly calm conditions, rivers, lakes and normal size chops. We developed it in the Douro River in Porto, Portugal where I get all sorts of conditions. So I would say that it is mostly a flat water board, with some great potential also in choppy waters but don’t expect to have a smooth ride in big ocean swells.

The hull of the board is nice & round, with a smooth diamond tail resulting in a great flat-water glide and extremely good wake riding abilities and agile turns.

Let’s say that all my knowledge about race boards is built into this racing machine. Why? Because I want to WIN and for winning you need a good board.

Could you introduce the company X-Bionic for those who are not familiar with it?

What I know from Xbionic’s Head of Marketing, Aitor Henao is that X-Bionic® and X-Socks® have been on the market for more than 20 years. It is the most awarded and innovative sportswear company on the sports market by far, always using the PATENT as a unique selling proposition. Where everyone was saying that the body must be dry during sports, Professor Lambertz, the company founder, proved that it is exactly the opposite and that the sweat is too precious to waste. The people at X-Bionic are primarily scientists who are curious and seek to find the right solutions to reach excellence and increase the performance of all athletes by looking into nature. Their products make that the persons using them can perform under all conditions without compromise.

XBionic boasts a very impressive list of sponsored athletes in many different sports. Can you explain how and why X-Bionic approached you as a potential collaborator?

Historically X-Bionic didn’t have an Elite Athletes team. The “Authentic Athletes®” team used to be people who use X-Bionic products in all kinds of situations. For sports like running, cycling of course… but also to work at the office, as a commercial flight pilot, a policeman, or a military officer…. Xbionic customers have been everyone who can profit from high technologies applied perfectly to very distinct situations in their daily lives. Then Aitor Henao 2 years ago, the new Head of Marketing & Communications at that time, decided to make a clearer move into Elite sports.

Here is Aitor Henao’s statement on the subject: “We never looked only on the sports performance or the kind of sport, but was inevitable to see, that the top athletes use our products and were easy to find people who match with our philosophy and love our products because with them they can enjoy the sports they love at the top performance. We wanted to have not only running, cycling or ski athletes like our core sports in our team, we knew, that there’s much people outside on other sports who profit the advantages of X-Bionic and X-Socks and we wanted to create this environment and show that we are more just a normal brand through this team.”

And here’s what he asked me to communicate about XBionic’s vision of me: “Bruno was for us the best option in the SUP world. A winner, a charismatic person, able to learn quickly and intelligent enough to understand that he had to rely on the best material mixed with his skills to compete at the maximum level. He is a lover of our Partialkompression® technology, which enables to reduce fatigue, less production of lactate, less heart bits per minute, and increase the performance by more than 15%…. What athlete doesn’t want to have this kind of advantage?

We started to have conversations and it became one of our successes in our team, he is not just one athlete, he is one of the leaders and inspirational persons who take care of the new athletes coming and create a lot of community and take our products to every single corner in this world. Professor Lambertz, the owner of the company, always looked for innovative ideas and to put something new on the market. This project have exactly this DNA of innovation we are used to when it comes to bringing a new product to the market.”

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After being introduced in 2019, hollow boards have not yet taken the world by storm, is it going to happen? Yours is “structural hollow”, what’s different with hollow?

Yes after getting introduced to hollow board in 2019 I started playing with the idea that I could have an advantage over traditional sandwich boards if we use this technology right.
It’s not easy to have a good overall performance race board in normal hollow construction.

So when we started this journey with X-bionic, I wanted to make something special that works very well and that’s why we created the “structural hollow” concept. I won’t tell you in details how we did it, but you can imagine it as an exoskeleton inside a hollow board. Resulting in an extremely solid and rigid board while keeping the weight very low. We have just had the first production boards shipped out at 8.8kgs)

I’m curious to see how many other companies will follow… Partly because many other hollow boards have an internal structure, but the difference is that WE at XBionic are honest and true with our customers.

We explain in detail the materials and solutions we use to create our Performance race board. Our aim is to grow the Sport as big as we can !

So, how much does the XBionic BR1 cost 🙂 ?

​Surprisingly, one of these beauties is quite affordable compared to other boards.
The price of the board is 2600 euros and for any country in Europe we offer the board for 2900 euros shipping included within 5 weeks after placing the order on the website.
For other continents, the board is 2600 + shipping ( that might vary)

What are X-Bionic development plans on the SUP market ? Will you be mainly focusing on SUP racing?

More boards will follow for sure but right now the XBionic BR1 is the only thing we have in mind… Again, I am passing our Head of Marketing, Aitor Henao’s statement: “In terms of SUP board development, right now the BR1 is our main focus as well as introducing the existing XBionic products to SUP racers. We design tech clothing aimed at increasing the performance of athletes, whatever their sport and level. The XBionic technologies are able to make you recover faster, last longer and better on the water than ever. Since flatwater SUP racers don’t have to swim and are hardly ever in the water, there is no need to build new lines of clothing with other materials than what we do right now for the moment. The most important message we want to convey is that we already provide clothing that allows you to train better, recover and perform better. On race day our shirts or pants will not make you win per say, but they will give you a big advantage over your opponents.”

For more details on Bruno Hasulyo’s XBionic BR1 board:

www.x-bionic.com/en/BR1-home
contact: bruno.hasulyo@x-bionic.com