Gentlemen,
I wish there was more to the story on this deal, but I just flat missed the gas in the Ski-Doo and had it wrong. Setting up the booth in Denver is always a big challenge and we got the sleds all up on the scales late Friday night. Saturday morning, I took my vacuum pump in the show and attempted to suck all the gas out of all the sleds. As most people know, I'd really rather weigh stuff full of fuel since that's a known, verifiable quantity but the show doesn't allow that much gas. The Rev/XP tanks are much more difficult to drain because of their shape and in spite of trying to get all the gas out, I simply didn't. When you consider the amount of effort that went in to building those those show sleds, our intent was certainly not to make the Polaris look better, but to show off how light either brand could be.
Now, as far as my personal favorite snowmobile, I always have to smile about that discussion. The fact is that we sell more Ski-Doos than Polaris sleds by a fairly wide (though narrowing) margin so from a business standpoint, it wouldn't make much sense to be promoting the RMKs more. For me, the choice of sleds has always come down to riding conditions and priorities. As I've stated on the blog and in the showroom repeatedly, there's simply no contest when you look at weight and horsepower. The Summits are lighter and make more power stock. That have been established, a lot of guys like the RMKs in the trees because they roll around easier. I also had no issue with riding the Cats, as was stated above, we just couldn't get the support from Cat that we felt we needed to take care of our customers. Finally, to be fair, the Yamaha is really a different snowmobile than the other three but we've had a lot of fun on turbo Apexes over the last few years too.
In terms of the sleds on display at the show, the point of the Dragon project was to show just about everything we could think of on one of them. To build another one like the show sled, the total price tag is about $19k. We also did quite a bit of work to the Ski-Doo, but let's be fair, there simply isn't as much heavy stuff from the factory to take off. Even with all the stuff done to the Ski-Doo, we had only about $2500 invested. I have a Holz suspension coming for it and will probably put a 15" wide track on it as well, just to save some more weight, but niether one of those parts was available at show time. Beyond that and perhaps a seat, I'm not sure there's much left to lighten up or take off the Summit.
As the sleds were displayed, once I got them full of gas, the Ski-Doo is about 20 pounds lighter. Full of fuel, the Summit is only 488 pounds and I believe with the rear skid and track we could be closing in on 465 pounds full. That's amazingly light compared to what impressed us even just five years ago. Even with the track and rear skid changed, you're still only talking $6500 worth of work on the Summit versus ~$8500 on the Dragon and the Summit's going to be over 40 pounds lighter. Combine that with about 7hp more right out of the box and that's going to be a fun ride. Hopefully the 860 kit sitting here waiting to go to the dyno will also contribute to overall fun factor.
There are pictures of both sleds full of fuel at xpcblog.com if anybody is interested in that.
Finally the point about ineptitude is well taken. There's really no excuse for getting it wrong which is why I immediately updated the data on our site as soon as we knew we got it wrong. We were rushing to get the sleds built and finished for the show and then rushing to get the booth set up and it wasn't until Sunday afternoon when the show slowed down that we got to stand there and think about the weights. We knew we had lost some weight on the Ski-Doo but quite honestly, I didn't think it was that much. I have taken a fair amount of fire over the years for telling the truth about dyno numbers, weights, etc. and I'm okay with that. However, when you pride yourself on telling the truth, you should have it right and I didn't on this one. For that, I apologize.
Thanks,
Donavon
Xtreme Performance Center, Inc.
