The complete guide to Starboard 2025 foilboards with Trevor Tunnigton, R&D Manager and Content Creator

A few days ago, Starboard unveiled its entire foilboard line-up for 2025. With a mix of new product, exciting developments and innovations, the Tiki brand is offering a wide range of boards to suit all tastes, all levels and all types of riding. The brand’s biggest innovation is the Above, a mid-length model that’s right in line with the current trend. Alongside it are the classic Take-Off and Wingboard, both of which have benefited from significant improvements in shape for their 2025 version. For racing, the X-15 is still here, while for downwind, the Ace now comes in two models: the Ace Foil Lightining and the Ace Foil, a very narrow model for expert riders, and a more accessible model. But that’s not all! Starboard has also included inflatable boards in its line-up: inevitably, when you have a concept as cool as the AirFoil (with the foil mounted on a plate located on the deck of the board), it would be a shame not to develop it further. To help you make sense of it all, and to help you make your choice if you’re in the market for a board, we asked Trevor Tunnington for some advices. Trevor is an Australian who works with Starboard as R&D Manager and Content Creator. His extensive expertise on foilboards and his feedback are really worth reading.

Hi Trevor, welcome to TotalWing! You’re R&D Manager at Starboard, can you tell us what that involves?

Hi Laurie, thanks for getting in touch and looking forward to telling you what goes on in the background at Starboard HQ.

I have a split role at Starboard which is R&D Manager and Content Creator. Basically my main role as R&D Manager means that I work with our talented shapers at our workshop and come up with new designs. We are lucky to have a team of five full time expert shapers that create all kinds of products in a super fast time period. Working in various roles within Starboard are different testers who have a range of accomplishments in Windsurf, SUP, Foilboard and Foils, and we have various team members help us test the latest concepts.

For a new foilboard for example, we will set a brief, draw a few different designs and work with our digital designers to create 3d models which we then CNC and test. If it’s a totally new range we will generally make around 6-8+ different shapes/prototypes in our CNC room and test each board against each other and see what works best.

Generally we do different product ranges throughout the year and most ranges from start to finish take us around 8 months to get to a master product.

We wanted to talk to you about Starboard’s 2025 range, which has just arrived, with some great developments on all the foilboards. Can you give us a quick rundown of the range and tell us how it’s organised?

So for the 2025 lineup for Foil Boards is where we have put in the most focus for this year. We wanted to come out with a board for every rider and we are really pleased with the results. Let’s look at the composite boards in order of aspect ratio:

1. Ace Foil Lightning

This range is a whole new concept and a very exciting future for the world of downwind SUP Foiling. The Ace Foil Lightning is based on our Ace Foil range but is in high aspect (long and narrow) size offerings. We pushed the boundaries this year with a world-first 15″ wide production board with our 7’5″ x 15″ model, which is the skinniest production downwind foilboard on the market. This is the pinnacle of speed and is designed for riders who are using super fast high aspect foils. The whole lightning range is in longer and narrower sizes to generate the best speed before take off, and is intended to be used with small and fast foils.

In the Ace Foil lightning range we are also excited to soon launch our Hollow range with the ZERO construction. This construction uses our hollow technology which we have had for a couple years now with the Sprint range. We brought this now to the 8’2″ x 18″ Ace Foil Lightning model to demonstrate what a high aspect ultra lightweight downwind board can really do.

2. Ace Foil 

The Ace Foil range was first released in 2024, and is our all round downwind range. We took our experience with the Ace raceboard which first launched back in 2010 and reformatted the design for foiling. This board has been a very popular model since we launched and riders love using the ace for light wind wing foiling, downwinding and SUP surf foiling. It’s both a truly great all rounder and focused downwind foilboard. The Ace Foil is designed in long and narrow sizes, but are lower aspect than the Ace Foil lightning range.

3. Above

After many days of light wind testing with the Ace Foil, we decided to blend together two of our favourite ranges and create our first mid length range. The Above is a blend of the Ace Foil and Take Off models. We felt that beginner and intermediate riders needed a model that is fast in the take offs but slightly wider than a downwind foilboard, so the above blends together many of our findings in the rest of the foilboard range in order to make a simple and easy to use board for everyone. The Above is a great learner board and lightwind wing foil board and is all round fun for freeride.

4. Take Off

The Take Off has been around since 2022 and this year we have launched a new shape for the Take Off. The Take Off is a performance all rounder, designed to be the best Freestyle foilboard. The last two cycles of the Take Off range I have co-designed this range with IQ Foil coach and co-designer Dan Arnon. With Dan’s expertise in numerous foiling sports from windsurf, downwind foil and wingfoiling, and combined with his close connections to olympic competitors and elite riders, we had a wide variety of great feedback from our new range. Along with Dan’s expert eye for detail, we feel that this is our most refined freestyle foilboard ever.

The Take Off boards are also designed to be more versatile; smaller sizes are designed to perform as a Prone surf foiling, and larger sizes as a SUP surf foilboard. We actually split the range in two, with sizes over 80L featuring a slightly different tail shape to prioritise smoother take offs when paddling into a wave. The smaller sizes feature a tail cutaway which we found to give faster release which we like alot for prone foiling and wingfoil freestyle. The 2024 model for Take Off claimed a silver medal in the GWA freestyle events and we are excited to see how riders perform with the new model in 2025.

5. Wingboard

The Wingboard is our high volume, wide and stable board. Svein took the lead with design for this range and has worked with the rest of the team from windsurf to bring over the concepts to make a practical and user friendly first time foilboard. The Wingboard is in wide and shorter sizes and is our high volume “compact” range and is quite a unique range as it is both high volume but features a very thin connection to the foil. This gives you the best of stability, float and direct connection to the foil.

6. X-15

The X-15 sounds familiar, and for good reason. Firstly we have had the X-15 on the Starboard Windsurf side for some good years now but the name was inspired by Jim Drake’s 1959 hypersonic rocket, which still holds the speed record today. Jim Drake worked very closely for many years at Starboard and this range was designed by Remi Villa as our race offering for both windsurfing and now Foilboard. The X-15 is designed to have amazing aerodynamics, fast take offs with small foils and enough volume to cater for most racers. We are also pushing this as our X-15 class offering which is featured in numerous events around the world in one design racing, encouraging more competitors to join the future of foil racing.

The new model in the 2025 range is the Above! We don’t have much information on this board at the moment, can you tell us a bit about it ?

So for the Above, the goal was to make an easy board for everyone; fast acceleration onto foil, balanced volume distribution and a great all round board for a range of wind speeds. This range for 2025 is offered in 5 sizes and we feel that the larger sizes are a great option for beginners. These mid sized boards are great fun for all rider levels, especially if you have some experience before in other wind sports. We blended together elements from all of our ranges but focused on blending the Take Off and Ace together for this series – giving you fast take off, easy touch down and balanced flight. We incorporated a pin tail design which gives you great speed before take off, and the take off nose shape to give you easy touch downs and stable performance. We offer all five sizes in both blue carbon and limited constructions.

The classic Wingboard is still there, but it seems to me that the volume distribution and the hull have been reworked on these 2025 versions, as well as a new ‘Limited Series’ construction. Could you give us some more details on this?

The Wingboard series is our shorter and wider board, designed for stability and ease of use. This range is a great first board as you have plenty of volume, stability and balance before getting onto foil. This edition of the Wingboard saw some key refinements to improve the ease of use of the range. We added in a large nose vee to give the board the easy touch downs. The vee helps to smoothly bounce the board back onto foil when you touch the water and increases the rockerline which gives you more room for error. The tail cutaways have also been refined to deliver early take off – this design feature was borrowed from the IQ Foil which you may have seen earlier this year in the Olympic games. Basically if it’s your first time foiling, then one of the 6 wingboard sizes are a great choice, offering stability, higher volumes in a smaller size and a user-friendly foiling experience.

A few weeks ago we reviewed the Take-Off 2025 with Benoit Carpentier. What can you tell us about the changes to this board?

The Take Off was a big focus for us this year. Dan and I did many rounds of testing and we really felt that we wanted to have a true performance freestyle board in smaller sizes, while offering a performance SUP surf foilboard in larger sizes. This year we made slightly longer but narrower take off sizes, while reducing thickness at the same time; giving the best of acceleration and handling. A key focus for us was having the perfect balance of volume distribution, so that the board sits level even on the smallest sizes. For example using the 30L Take Off with a rider who is 85kg can be very challenging if the board doesnt sit level underwater, so we made sure to fine tune the distribution so that riders can use even smaller boards. On the larger sizes, we filled in the tail cutaways as we found that this helped to give you a smooth release when SUP Foil surfing. The cutaways can give you quite an aggressive and fast release – which we really like on smaller models. For SUP Foiling we felt that the smoother pitch control was important when taking off on steeper critical waves. We had alot of fun testing out the larger sizes for SUP Foiling in overhead Bali surf and getting that pitch control was really key to the performance of this board.

In terms of the X-15, logically there have been no changes? What feedback have you had from riders who have been using it all season?

For the X-15, the goal is a user-friendly racing model. We did not change this board as we feel that this is the best balance for those getting into racing while offering the fastest performance shape. X-15 is intended to be a one design class and we have been working alot with numerous events this year to bring exposure to the sport of Wing Foil racing and encourage more competitors to join our awesome sport. The X-15 will remain the same shape for many years to come in the class size model.

X-15 Class One Design Wingfoil Training Camp in Dongo, Lake Como, Italy. Photo by Georgia Schofield.

The AirFoil, our favourite inflatable board, now comes in three models: the ‘classic’, the Ace AirFoil and the AirFoil Learner. What can you tell us about the new features in this range ?

Innovation in the world of inflatable foil boards has been super interesting. Roman Borisov is our inflatable manager and has brought through some amazing new concepts to these boards, including the new vee nose design in our Ace Foil Inflatable range. This is a world first in inflatable technology, and it’s impressive to bring this technology to enhance the performance for our ace foil. We found that this added vee design helps with both tracking and touchdowns for the ace series – bringing these boards one step closer to the same performance as our composite range.

All inflatable foil boards also feature Starboard’s patented airfoil plate technology, which allows you to mount the foil millimeters away from your feet. The plate comes in carbon and aluminium constructions and is a top mounted standing plate (imagine a pump board only with additional inflatable flotation). Also for the Ace Airfoil Roman brought over the EVA standing tray from the Airline inflatable race series, which gives you a wider standing area and totally flat platform. This platform is 5cm wider than the actual board so you feel more stable on a narrower model. The Inflatable Foilboard side has seen alot of cool technology and features come through this year and it’s been great to see Romans concepts come to life on these models.

A quick word on the AceFoil 2025 and the AceFoil Lightning: compared to the Above, can these boards still be used for wingfoil lightwind or downwind or are they now only intended for SUP foil downwind at a good level?

Every board can also be used for Wingfoiling in lightwind. Narrower and longer boards are faster in the takeoffs whereas shorter medium aspect boards are more stable and user friendly as a wingfoil model. While the Ace Foil and Ace Foil Lightning are super fast in the Take Offs, they are primarily designed as a downwind range, whereas the Above’s shape is designed to be an easier to use option for wingfoiling. Touchdowns on the above are especially impressive as it utilises a wider nose design that is intended to bounce back smoothly at various angles when touching. The Ace Foil and Ace Foil Lightning ranges are primarily designed as a downwind range and in downwinding we have a narrower nose outline and rebound at different angles to the wing. So the short answer is yes the Ace Foil and Ace Foil Lightning make great crossover lightwind wing models, however the Above is a more user friendly mid length dedicated wing foil model.

And personally, what’s your quiver in the range?

In my garage in Australia, my foilboard quiver consists of the 6’0″ x 24″ 95L Take Off for SUP Foil, a 4’7″ x 20″ 40L Take Off which I use for Prone surf foiling (and wing foil when the wind is over 20 knots), a 55L Take Off 4’10” x 21″ for freestyle in all wind speeds, the Ace Foil Lightning 7’6″ x 17″ with fast high aspect downwind foils and the Ace 7’0″ x 20″ for smaller SUP Foil days and lightwind winging.

I’ll leave you with the last word? What are your future projects for yourself or with the brand?

For me, there are many future projects on the radar within Starboard. The Starboard team is like one large family and this year we will combine forces to link together our knowledge and experience across windsurf, foilboard and SUP – to see how we can improve together as a group. We have learnt so much from iconic shapes like the Ace race board, the X-15 windsurf board and blending together proven concepts with new sports is a great way to build a strong product. In two weeks time I am also excited to spend a couple weeks in my homeground in Australia where I will be enjoying the products that we have developed this year and share the stoke with local riders while taking their opinions on our current range and future concepts. If I look back at the last five years of Foilboard design and see the radical changes that we have brought to market, it makes me excited to see what the future looks like and what kinds of shapes will make production in the future. So much to learn with this new sport and so many boards to enjoy. I hope you like the new range of Foil Boards that we have on offer. It was a pleasure working with our expert team in Bangkok to make these products possible.

Thank you very much Trevor for this very detailed and insightful look at the Starboard foilboard range!

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