As a wider-bodied front side ski, the 2024 Head Super Joy is an awesome choice for advanced and expert skiers who spend most of their time in search of the perfectly carved turn. By using many of the technologies and advancements from Head’s racing program, the Super Joy holds a high level of performance and quality to it that a lot of skiers will thoroughly enjoy. With a new shape that’ll help more skiers access the totality of the ski’s potential, the Super Joy is one of the smoothest performers of this grouping. It has a huge advantage being a part of the Head on-piste lineup, and this will correlate directly to the skier’s level of satisfaction with each and every clean carve on the hill.

From a build perspective, we benefit from the use of Head’s Carbon Sandwich Cap Construction. Starting with a wood core that mixes light and energetic karuba with solid and stable ash, the Super Joy gets an advanced start. They then add carbon laminates to the top and the bottom of the ski, producing a massive amount of stiffness at a pittance of weight. On top of the core, Head adds another graphene strip to stiffen the ski even further and provide a lot of feedback and pop. The carbon does a lot of the heavy lifting here, as it’s incredibly responsive and has a direct sense of precision and grip. For a ski like this, that’s a huge benefit.

The shape gets a bit of an update here, with a rounding of the tip and an elongating of the turn radius. While before, the skis had a more squared-off tip shape, the new one is rounder and slightly more tapered. This combines with a narrower tail to make a longer shape. But not too long, as the Super Joy still produces a relatively short 14-meter arc in the 163 cm length. This opens up the trails for some clean and round carves for sure, but since it’snot quite as locked into the turn as it was previously, there’s more emphasis on the skier’s input to make the ski find its path down the fall line. While narrow at 75 mm underfoot in the 163, the ski fits right into the wider bodied front side category that has been picking up a lot of steam lately. It’s not like the ski is fat, rather it’s got a nice platform to stand on and balance. Sure, there are both wider and narrower skis out there, but the 75 is a good mix of the two, allowing for proper torsional stiffness while keeping a slightly friendlier overall character.

We’ve loved this Super Joy and its ability to carve clean and round turns for quite a while now, and those feelings carry forward into 2024. The fact that we get a more refined shape in both front and rear makes us love the ski even more, as it falls more into the category of relatable and approachable skis. If you spend most of your time in an on-trail format and have the skills to stand on a sturdy and capable ski that wants to go, the Head Super Joy is one of the best of the bunch.