Dimitri Van den Bergh G1 90% Tungsten Swiss Point Darts

Well, I’m pretty sure not many people saw the transition of Dimitri Van den Bergh from Unicorn to Target coming.

Van den Bergh is a young guy with many high profile scalps under his belts, and comes across as an all-round nice guy.

The Unicorn version of his darts was very similar in profile to the Unicorn Kim Hambrecht’s style of darts.

With Dimitri’s change to the Target brand ‘his’ generation 1 darts are a huge change from what was.

I think the question to ask is they for me (you)?

Target have done their usual trick and produced a dart that is a little bit out of left field. The Original Dimitri dart was a parallel barrel with a snub radiuses nose and a centrally grooved grip section.

The New Target version is really a radical departure from the original (for obvious reasons). It is a series of textures and grip profiles that make the barrel stand out in the crowd. But it’s really up to the individual to decide whether they are ‘the ones’ for them.

There are some interesting inclusions in this set that actually go beyond just the styling of the darts.

But let’s take a look at what we have.

The barrels of the 21 gram version are exactly 50mm long; the first 9mm of the barrel is the nose. The nose is tapered and starts at 3.9mm in diameter and opens up to the full 6.3mm barrel diameter, interestingly the nose has a diamond knurl finish and is followed by a 6mm length of micro grooves. This initial portion of the barrel is sandblasted giving the nose region a graphite grey finish.

The grey gives way to a 20mm length of double rings that have a square cut finish, followed by a 6mm plain section which in turn is followed by a 6mm section with a mini shark grip before returning to another short plain section that tapers slightly to meet the shaft.

They are also available in 23 and 25 gram weights.

The barrel looks impressive, being a Swiss point barrel, the points fitted are the new Swiss DX points a combination of a Diamond grip, Nano grip and Fire point style, but they are really effective.

The darts are finished with yet another new coloured Pro Grip Shaft and Dream Maker themed flights.

The darts are really perfectly balance and fly really nicely, the 21g weight works really well for me although I did encounter a hitch.

The darts look and feel really good in the hand, I found that depending where I held the darts I would sometimes manage to get my fingers across the two rear grips and I’d have a ‘sticky’ dart situation. That is when I released the dart the grips would grab the soft skin on my fingers and I’d either flick the dart or not release it properly.

The grip is a bit misleading and there’s a lot of it and its close together, it probably rates at 3 out of 5 but because of the close proximity might give some players grief. I found it a bit frustrating but could work around it by focusing on where my fingers were before I threw the darts.

I went through a number of practice drills and slipped back into my old habits a few times with an odd wild dart. I’ll say from now, this will be a barrel that people either love or hate, some may find the grip over the top, or may be able to work around the grip.

This is a lot of dart for the price, that said I have a couple of issues to raise.

• By packing the darts as a pre-assembled set, the packaging ruins the flights and turns them into propellers (I really hate that).
• Sand Coloured Pro Grip shafts? Really? Don’t we have enough colours to choose from?

Other than that, I quite like them, although the grip is always in the back of my mind.

Overall, these sit at 4 out of 5. Maybe they can fix the grip on the G2 and everything will be perfect.