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"Win on Sunday; sell on Monday" is the slogan automakers have sworn by for years.
However, when you look at racecars in the big leagues these days, it's hard to see much of a connection between what's raced on the track and what's being sold in the showroom.
NASCAR racecars don't have much relevance to the development of consumer products. In many cases, consumers' cars are more advanced than the racecars, since much of our everyday electronics is banned in many racing series.
Snowmobile racing pictureHow about snowmobiles? Is racing really beneficial to the average trail machine, or is it only marketing fluff for brand recognition?
Looking back at 40 years of snowmobile racing, a very different picture emerges. Snowmobile racing has had a very strong and accelerated effect on product development. Those factories that did well in racing did well in the marketplace, not just from strong brand identification, but also from better performing snowmobiles that put them out front of their competitors. It's no coincidence that the four surviving manufacturers have had strong, successful racing programs dating back to the early 1970s.
As a matter of fact, it's easy to make the case that if one series got so specialized that the racing sleds no longer resembled a trail sled, manufacturers would leave that venue and race someplace else where they could get results that were relevant to their production sleds, and there were plenty of racing series to choose from. Through the 1990s you could pick from oval racing, snocross, cross-country, enduro, ice drags, grass drags, asphalt drags, speed runs and water skipping.
All these circuits had good support from the factories through I.S.R., and snowmobile racing was teaming with participants in both the amateur and professional ranks. If a brand didn't win the oval series, it may advertise its wins in enduro or cross-country. Everyone had a winning team somewhere, and customers could enjoy racing their sleds in many ways.
Unfortunately, somewhere in the mid-'90s the factories decided to back racing on "the next level" with national TV coverage as one of the main goals. TV coverage costs a lot of money, and the decision was made to pull support from the smaller circuits and put it all into snocross. The result was a decline in all the grass roots circuits that had benefited from factory support, while the snocross circuit flourished. Yet when the cost of TV proved much higher than the money pro-racing could bring in, the WPSA snocross circuit went bankrupt. If your main show goes away, where do you race, if your other circuits disappeared from lack of support?
Racing todayFortunately, ISOC has stepped up for now with a much more sensible TV program geared to air on local snow-belt stations. Manufacturers are watching with caution, and also starting to support other circuits again like cross-country, enduro and oval racing. Ski-Doo has been dominant in cross-country, Yamaha now has a winning record in enduro at the Soo I-500, while Arctic Cat has done well in oval racing at the Eagle River World Championship. Polaris has excelled of late in snocross.
Oval racing was the big show early in the '70s. Oval racing could be staged at fairgrounds or on lakes around the snow belt. Cross-country racing also was popular among the manufacturers who wanted to prove their product against the many brands competing in the booming marketplace. The Ironwood "Olympics" was the first major race of the year, and featured both a cross-county track and an oval race. Wins at Ironwood were quickly advertised, and because they took place on the first weekend in December, the results had a great influence on sales. In fact, many would wait to buy a sled until they could see the results from the many stock classes run there.
Factory support was on an unheard of level. Ski-Doo would show up with three tractor trailers, 27 factory drivers, and 100+ sleds. In 1970 Ski-Doo spent $1.2 million on its racing program. Try and convert that into a budget for today.
As a result, product development progressed at a frantic pace. Top of the chassis mounted engines were replaced with low, front-mounted engines. Boggie wheels were replaced with slide-rail suspensions, European industrial based engines were replaced with high-revving purpose-built Japanese engines. Megaphones had to move aside for much more powerful expansion chamber exhausts. Tillotson pumper carbs were replaced with more tunable Mikuni float bowl carbs.
With this increasing power, clutch belts blew with unwanted regularity, and went from glass fiber to Kevlar cords and improved compounds. Clutches went from industrial high-friction units with stamped steel sheaves to purpose-built aluminum systems with flyweights, torque feedback helixes and reduced internal friction.
Secondaries were mounted on a cross shaft instead of a flimsy fabricated steel chaincase. This eliminated flex in the chassis and kept the clutches in alignment for improved belt life. Polyurethane tracks were replaced with cleated designs, and a whole industry popped up supplying traction products and carbide runners as the racetracks transitioned from snow to ice ovals.
All this took place in a few short years from 1968 to 1975 and in a furious pace pushed by the need to succeed in racing to secure market position. By 1975 we were in the first gas crisis combined with several years of low snow, pretty much the situation we've seen from 2000 to 2007. The market had also peaked, and sales tumbled from a high of 650,000 units to only 80,000 units in a few short years. Manufacturers left the industry in droves, until only the present four were left. Competition between the survivors was still intense for the remaining market share, and racing was still the favored marketing tool.
Back in the mid-'70s Chaparral hired Indy 500 champion Bobby Unser to help in its racing effort, and he was instrumental in developing the first coil over shock controlled IFS ski suspension. Unfortunately the design did not have time to prove itself before Chaparral had to close its doors. Gilles Villenvue took up the idea and made it a winning concept, but before it could reach a production sled he disappeared into Formula 1 car racing as a Ferrari driver.
Bob Eastman, the Polaris racer and team manager jumped on the new concept, and with much research and many changes made a dominant racer out of the RXL. It was a game changer that left everyone else in a panic to catch up. Polaris also made a cross-country sled with the new IFS system and when the IFS Indy models came out, it pushed Polaris to first in the market and a dominant place in racing for close to 20 years. Talk about a payoff from racing development!
Ski-Doo could not sit back and watch Polaris dominate, and after awhile it introduced its Twin Track oval racer. This concept became dominant on the oval circuit, but had a negative effect on racing. The Twin Tracker was very advanced, but totally irrelevant to production sleds. Instead of using money developing a concept with no benefit to a consumer sled, the other manufacturers left the oval racing F1 class, and put their efforts into stock classes on the oval or supported cross-country and enduro racing where the sleds took a beating and the resulting feedback would improve the consumer product.
In order to bring factories back to oval racing, ISR and Jerry Korinek from USSA developed a new Formula III class were the racing sleds were based on manufacturer's top line single-track "muscle sleds." The concept took off and became the premier factory oval racing class. Eventually this class also became very fast, and after an accident-filled season, the manufacturers lowered the engine size to 600cc. To transition to the new rules, manufacturers were allowed to race prototype engines for 2 years. This spurred new triples from Ski-Doo and Arctic Cat. Ski-Doo quickly dominated, and the other makers moved to the new snocross format, where production-based 2-cylinder engines were gaining favor, and relevant development of new suspension systems made more sense.
What of the future?Looking back, the plan worked well with a fast pace of development that has given us A-arm ski suspensions, coupled long-travel rear suspensions and new rider-forward chassis designs.
Many now question if this direction may also have run its course as many new snocross-based sleds are too tippy for riding groomed trails. Not many trail riders need to "sky" 20 ft. to clear triple jumps, bust through 5-foot moguls or bank off 6-foot berms to turn their sled. Maybe snocross has run its course as an area for relevant consumer trail sled development.
Arctic Cat has understood this with its new low-riding, fast trail/lake blasting Z1 turbo. The Big 4 again are looking at cross-country, enduro and oval racing for feedback that will help their consumer sleds.
Does snowmobile racing benefit the consumer? You bet, but when throwing money at irrelevant concepts becomes the result, factories move on to venues that make more sense to improving their consumer sleds!