the majority of the crowd on this forum is west coast, dunes and desert. bigger tires are king, they pull harder in the dunes and ride smoother in the rough stuff. a CVT is a lot more forgiving because of how it can be "tricked" to stay in a lower gear ratio longer to help churn the bigger tires, ALL THE WHILE, staying at peak RPM for peak power so every second you are in the throttle its pumping out peak HP if the clutch is calibrated properly to hold RPM under loads. you put a set of 30s on a yamaha and hit the sand dunes, and you no longer are able to blast thru the dunes in 4th gear , you are jamming 2nd gear at the rev limiter hoping to have the power to climb the dunes at a whopping 25mph while the guys in a reflashed X3 with stock everything and 32s are wide open at peak power never bogging and climbing hills at 45+mph.
a small power NA car with set gears isnt gonna ever be as fast and give the fun factor for the guys looking for a thrill ride. it sucks to watch your buddies walk away from you when you are beating on your machine like a rental full throttle and the buddies are walking away from you. double the HP and better suspension and bigger tires, you cant and wont ever overcome those hurdles. half the power, half the suspension, and 4" smaller tire. you can put the best racer you have ever met in the seat and he wont be able to keep up with a slightly modded stock X3 or TurboRZR.
above you said something about how i "try to fix" the clutches, i dont try, i do fix them. i am the best on the market at building them better.
also, you said how the yamaha is better faster and shifting gears is better. i dont doubt you might think that. seems like you dislike the belt so much that you are wanting to jump ship ASAP for something that you deem better but it also seems you are worried about resale values on your now used and clapped out machine. you ever priced a lexus, mercedes, cadillac, BMW? please for the fun of it google "worst resale values by brands" you might be surprised that the best cars, with the highest price tags, have the worst resale. you should know that lexus is built by toyota, awesome standards, some models built exclusively in japan, the best of the best of everything. i owned a Lexus ISF for 11 months and lost $13,000 when i tried to trade it in. paid my notes and was still upside down -$13,000 in less than a year. on the 10 worst resale list i believe cadillac has 2 or 3 models.... wonder why? the flagship of quality and luxury from GM, how is their resale the worst? its just how it is, and your machine is worth half what you paid for it. sorry thats just how things go sometimes no matter how expensive they start out.
two customers of mine, race trophy trucks in Lucas and Torc and UTVs for fun at local series and GNCC. they were in Polaris XP1000 and i had them fixed up, they were fast and if the machine made it to the finish line they were 1-2 every race. they are pro racers and you pretty much cant touch them. one of them holds the track record at my place and when he set it he was nearly 7 seconds faster than the next fastest guy. thats pretty blazing. when the yamaha came out, both built a yamaha, they did the oil mods for the trans, the clutch packs, the gears, they did everything you gotta do to make it fast and reliable, they had penske work on the shocks, E2R, Fox, they had everybody work on the shocks and they were never happy with the suspension yet they continued to race them for a solid year.... or one of them held on to a year the other parked his midway thru the year and went back to his polaris. neither ever won anything, matter of fact i saw at one race, one of the guys getting lapped by a modded RZR900. how is this so? because the suspension, gearing, and steering are not exactly ideal for some forms of riding and racing. these endurance races racing thru woods courses and mixed with short courses in fields, the yamaha was only in the peak power at a small portion of the engine RPM band, you are constantly shifting trying to keep it in the sweet spot, and you are so busy shifting you cant hold onto the wheel and drive like you want (yes the new paddle shift models fix this) but they still no matter what were never happy with the suspension and could never ever drive them as fast as the XP1000. eventually they both went back to XP1000, one raced and won GNCC this year in XP1000 and also raced an X3 in a local series. for the winnings at GNCC championship he won a new polaris and when asked if he was gonna build it, he said nope... gonna sell it and use the money to buy an X3. both of those guys are now in X3 at local series. you are not gonna get a power hungry go-fast guy to hop in a machine with half the power.
you watched the honda launch vid? looks like brokeback mountain remade. i think the honda launch vid was made for the millenials twenty-thirty somethings lookin to get off fortnite and into offroad for real. i mean.... a random guy driving thru the trails, and some other random guy runs up and acts like a total nerd and you pick up said passerby and go riding off into the sunset together. i dont think this machine is made for the manly man, more like the brokeback mountain men.
