AmSnow.com is now SnoWest.com
Summit has history of change
The Summit has long been an important part of Ski-Doo’s lineup. As a matter of fact, the first Summit created the mountain sled segment. Before Ski-Doo launched Summit, you had to build your own mountain machine if you wanted to play in deep snow or on the mountains.
Years ago a popular combination was a long-track Polaris chassis combined with a Ski-Doo engine. When Pierre Beaudoin, the grandson of Bombardier’s founder, was named president of the Bombardier snowmobile division he went on a fact-finding mission that sent waves through the industry. I can still remember him at a West Yellowstone industry event walking around the staging area, a string of engineers trailing behind him taking notes. Everything was questioned, from engines to throttle-levers.
“How come our throttles are so hard to pull when we only have 2 carbs? This Yamaha 4-cylinder V-Max has 4 carbs, but the throttle pull is only half as hard as ours,” he asked, and so it went from sled to sled.
Having lunch with Pierre was more like an interrogation session. He would pump you for all the information he thought he could get out of you, and when your answers became marginal he would jump to the next member of our editorial staff. When he found out that I had worked for Evinrude, he gave me an extra grilling.
It was evident back then that he had his eyes on adding the outboard motor maker to Bombardier’s portfolio. He also organized a manufacturers’ ride, where all the manufacturers’ staffs went on a long ride and each rider had a chance to try out the competitors’ models. That was unusual for the time, but today is routine at our industry’s spring test session and photo shoot. During a lunch this spring I talked with Jean François Lambert, Ski-Doo’s new director of engineering. He was there riding all the competitors’ new sleds in the true Pierre tradition.
The key is putting the knowledge learned at such events to good use.
In the past, Pierre had taken all that he had learned about the competition’s sleds, and his own product’s strengths and weaknesses to Chris Ruske at his shop in Grand Lake, Colo. There Pierre learned all he could about mountain snowmobiling, and he could hardly have found a better teacher. We went on a ride with Chris at that time (20 years ago) and Ruske was jumping off 30-foot cliffs back then! Such maneuvers are something you only see now in today’s radical videos, and with much better equipment.
The result of Pierre’s groundwork was a long relationship between Chris and Ski-Doo and the establishment of Ski-Doo’s mountain test site that Chris still runs. Before long Ski-Doo launched the Summit as the first deep snow mountain machine, creating a new segment.
Today this segment remains important to Ski-Doo, and its mountain team continues making changes to keep Ski-Doo on the cutting edge. Its light, powerful 800cc and 600cc E-TEC 2-stroke engines keep weight down and this new chassis with the tMotion has repositioned the Summit as the leading mountain sled again. (See our Best of the Best awards, p. 45.)
American Snowmobiler considers the mountain segment so important that the magazine has a dedicated mountain test crew based in Idaho and headed by Stephen Clark. At the spring tests Stephen and his main test rider (Josh Skinner) concentrate on testing all the new mountain models. They also did some extended riding on the Summit after our event.
When I checked with Stephen recently he gave the new Summit a thumbs-up and rated it No. 1 among new mountain models. He gave it exceptionally high marks for its turning ability with tMotion and FlexEdge track, and the ease of steering with the new skis and spindles. For more of Stephen’s impressions check out his
mountain report in this issue.
It’s fun to see that the mountain snowmobile is constantly being developed and that new ideas are still being tested, especially in these tough economic times when you may forgive manufacturers if they back off to save some R&D money.
Yet with a slightly more stagnant market, like we have today, market share becomes important, and innovation will get you ahead if it gives your sled a real advantage. I am betting that the new Summit will grab a larger share of the mountain segment it pioneered.