The Hy-Road Solid is the newest entry into Storm’s Thunder line. This ball takes the highly successful Inverted Fe2 weight block and wraps it with the R2S solid reactive from balls like the T-Road and Victory Road Solids. This time, the cover is finished at 2000 grit, providing plenty of hook on our heavy test pattern.

All three testers were able to have miss room right of target on the heavy pattern. We are only able to accomplish this with really strong bowling balls on this pattern. Even our lower rev tester was able to hook this ball with ease. The smooth reaction shape made adjustments easy, all we had to do was move our feet farther left to find more oil in the front for the Hy-Road Solid. We did not have to make any surface changes to the ball on this pattern.

The sport pattern was next for us, and again the box finish was best. The sanded cover gave us plenty of hook and it helped with smoothing out the reaction when the ball got out of the pattern. We were able to stay farther right, closer to the track and just allow the Hy-Road Solid to make its smooth arc to the pocket.

Moving to the medium pattern, only Stroker was able to keep this ball at the box finish. He was a good arrow farther left of where he usually starts on this pattern, but because of how strong the Hy-Road Solid is, he needed to catch more oil in the front. Tweener and Cranker ran into the same issue on this pattern. The Hy-Road Solid wanted to hook early, so they moved left to give it more room and the ball would use up too much energy, resulting in these testers getting 9 more often than not. We took both these test balls to the spinner and used Storm’s Step 2 compound on them. The higher surface gave both testers more skid and more continuation. This adjustment allowed both to see an immediate improvement in their strike percentage.

All three testers struggled on the dry test pattern, even after using a big glob of Storm Xtra Shine. This ball is just too strong for lower volume, short oil patterns.

Strengths: The amount of total hook created by this ball is its biggest asset. The arcing shape that it creates will help tame down over/under reactions created by other balls that respond too quickly to friction.

Weaknesses: Dry heads will keep this ball in the bag. At the box finish, keeping the angles in front of the lane closed off was a key to consistently carrying the corner pin.

Overall Summary: The Hy-Road Solid easily provides more total hook than any previous “Road” series ball. This ball will be most useful on heavy volume and flatter oil patterns.