Last year I got the opportunity to blast a Polaris RZR around on desert trails in southern Nevada as part of a BFGoodrich promotion for the Mint 400. Of all the things that I could say about the Polaris, “lacking power” wasn’t one of them. The RZR 1000 EPS had more than enough grunt to make short work of the rocky trails and wide-open two-tracks that we visited, and I was not wanting more. Could a UTV require more power? Eh…there’s plenty of people who have turbocharged the engines, sprayed the engines with nitrous, but this is the first time in my memory that I’ve seen an LS-swapped RZR.
At some point, a Polaris quits being a UTV and morphs into something resembling a sandrail, and that appears to have happened here. A 525 crate engine is mated up to a Weddle transaxle and breathes out of a Magnaflow exhaust. We love this thing already, and that’s before the ORI struts with nineteen inches of travel or the track width that is a very wide 88 inches. “Small utility vehicle” isn’t in the cards anymore. But imagine this sucker with paddle tires in the dunes…we are all about that program!
I drove a RZR once. It bored me shitless. Mash the gas and listen to it rev to the moon, and steer. I guess it’s great for the beer drinking, bass thumping morons who want to go thrashing through the woods just so they can drive with a beer in one hand. I think Yamaha built one with a real standard, clutched transmission, and missed the target market Polaris seems to have hit. I’ll pass…