The !Q Tour Fusion
Review Date: 4 February 2014
Reviewed by:
Storm/Roto Grip staffer John Brockland
Style: Stroker Rev Rate: 280-310
PAP: 5.25" over and 1" up
Before having the privilege of being an Advisory Staffer with Roto Grip beginning in 2013, the !Q TOUR SOLID was for me a ball that often provided a very effective, smooth shaped means of attacking both house shots and some flatter tougher patterns. What stands out in my mind still is the ability it gave me to negotiate a 42-foot, high volume, 1.8 to 1 ratio, US Open type pattern with tons of out of bounds at the 11thFrame.com Open a few years ago. The ball was smooth enough to let me take an "old school" fall back approach to the pattern but was still strong enough to hit well.
Before signing with Roto Grip, I had little chance to get much use out of the !Q TOUR PEARL. The little I was able to use it was mostly hit and miss in terms of success and always left me thinking that adjusting the surface some more may have made the right difference.
When the privilege came at the beginning of this year to have clearance now as a Pro Shop Staffer to use both the Storm and Roto Grip brands, I was intrigued that one of the first options for me from Storm was going to be the new !Q TOUR FUSION - the hybrid in the !Q Tour series. I've always had great success with hybrids in general, so I was excited about this one. Not having had much experience with the PEARL, it's hard for me to say how this ball compares to that one. Predictably I find it has more length than the SOLID and is much more respectful of oil. It also reacts strongly to friction, but I wouldn't exactly call it flippy. I drilled mine exactly the same way as I drilled my SOLID - pin about an inch above my ring finger (4.25 from PAP) with about a 60 degree drilling angle.
My first two outings with it have both been in league circumstances on house shots. One is a center where the shot is somewhat blended still with a lot of volume in the middle, and where the backend reaction is historically a sluggish one - a shot missed at the bottom of the swing a little bit will almost always result in a plaque ten or pocket seven-ten. In that instance, I have to honestly say that the FUSION was not King Kong. It left me stuck in a four pin/plaque ten ball reaction almost no matter what I tried and any shot when my release wasn't optimal for sure did not go through the pins well at all. My first impression therefore was that the FUSION was too strong a shell on too weak a core for my stroker game. I felt like the strength of the shell forced me too deep into the oil in the front part of the lane and the C3TM Centripetal Control Core just wasn't strong enough for me to get good recovery through the tightness of the back ends in that center. Then when I saw what the FUSION did during the title match of this year's TOC when Wes Malott missed his first shot in the tenth at the bottom and a little target left and the ball never got into a strong enough roll to get any forgiving recovery, I found myself thinking that the FUSION for sure wasn't going to be forgiving enough for me to get a whole lot of use out of it.
However, my second outing with the FUSION was in a center with more of a hooking house shot, still lots of volume in the middle but much stronger back ends. In that instance, the FUSION was like a totally different ball for me from the get-go. When the transition started after game one, I started to see a little of what I had seen with it the time before but with the hooking back ends in this second center it was easy to make that four pin/plaque ten reaction go away simply by moving deeper in the fronts and making sure the ball got fully into the dry down lane. When that happened, the FUSION went through the pins like a champ.
The third outing with the FUSION was on the 2013 USBC Open Championships Doubles/Singles Pattern in our STL Winter Sport League on original pro-anvilane. I was really pleased with the way the FUSION evened out what last year had been a pretty touchy pattern for me. On that medium volume, 39-foot pattern the FUSION was clean enough through the fronts and early midlane to give me the length needed and it read well enough through the rest of the midlane and beyond to open up a pretty generous breakpoint downlane. I stuck with it intentionally through the four-game league session to see how it would handle the transition and it was no problem as I migrated left. It kept performing pretty much as well as it did at the outset. I threw a couple of extra shots at the end of the night just for the sake of some comparison and, while I think I'll find the FUSION helpful in some similar situations down the road, I still think for my stroker game the ASYLUM from Roto Grip might end up being the more appealing and more versatile midrange hybrid in my book. It's core is just a little stronger and more forgiving for me on shots when my release might get a little weak.
 
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