Yamaha is advertising Cats sleds! You know the ones Cat builds for them and puts on sweet Yamaha stickers. They havn,t designed a sled since what? 2008! All they have designed since then in a engine plate for a Cat chassis, a turbo engine, air shock rear skid, and a coupled front shock system, other then the new engine and possibly the air shock skid the rest are refinements at best. two of those being on a discontinued sled! Until Yamaha builds a sled of their own they are the proud company of two engines (oh wait three including the VK540) everything else is Cats or rather textrons. They build a Vector and a VK! One being 20 years old and the other dates back to 2003!
I can't blame Yamaha though as hard as I try, because even the yamaha riders, many of them right here on TY diced the hell out of Yamaha and ran down everything they made because they where heavy, they burned oil, carb jets always plugging, no fuel injection, suspensions sucked and broke, handlebar warmers didn't work, front ends wore out and where loose, Front ends bent and broke if you hit a bump in the trail, exhaust headers cracked and broke, donuts blew out in a season, idler wheels where junk, tracks where junk, handling was bad, off trail was bad, no bump sled, no mountain sled, to much ice buildup in the tunnel and the list goes on! Hell when the competition is all over you because your sled is way to heavy and is a slug, well thats one thing but when your riders turn on you as well, time to stop building sleds cause you suck and contract that out to the competition! Stick to what you are good at, refine the hell out of things and build engines! Who can blame them?
Yamaha is no longer a Sled Manufacture and has taken a back seat to Cat and the rest of the industry. There are now three sled Manufactures left and one engine builder! I don't see anything that proves that statement wrong! They stunned the industry and set the bar high with their four stroke sleds in 2003. With the moving of all their sleds to the cat lineup one can hope its a stopgap measure while the get their ducks in a row so they can stun the industry again, but they need a place to design and to manufacture and to test. Lets see they have offices! No manufacturing plant, all their manpower is over at Cat fitting engines and trying to improve Cat quality to keep their dealers selling the competitions sleds, so again at this rate, at Yamaha's speed of doing things, I'll be long dead and buried before anything comes from Yamaha! Worse yet will it be outdated and in need of tons of refinements to make it a sled worth riding. Maybe best if they just let Cat build sleds and they can sell engines out of Japan!
