Why Short-Course Racing a UTV Is the Most Intense Driving I’ve Ever Done

In off-roading these days, driving a hardcore side-by-side comes awful damn close to the stupefying performance of full-blown trophy trucks, just ones that are smaller and somehow far more accessible to the masses. The SXS industry clearly took major strides over the past two decades, coming a long way from essentially glorified four-wheel-drive golf carts. Especially the Can-Am Maverick R and Polaris Rzr Pro R, both of which can now do upward of 100 miles an hour at top speed in the desert—not to mention rock crawling with seven-figure Ultra4 cars at gnarly races like King of the Hammers.

The borderline unbelievable capability of side-by-sides, also known as UTVs, truly blew my mind when I pre-ran the Baja 1000 in a Rzr Pro R two years ago, then drove a Dakar-winning Maverick R. More recently, racer Kyle Chaney drove a Can-Am to an overall win at King of the Hammers, taking down legit Ultra4 cars in the rocks. Lightweight and affordable, plus easy to work on when things inevitably do break, UTVs now represent arguably the easiest way to jump headlong into grassroot motorsport. Sure, racing is never cheap, but as I learned this past fall at a weekend visiting Crandon International Raceway, even in short course racing, the main challenge still comes down to driver skill as much as anything else.

Call me a speed freak if you will, but in Baja, my guide Casey Currie—who previously won the Baja 1000, King of the Hammers, and Dakar alike—regularly (and only somewhat jokingly) referred to me as the Michael Schumacher of the desert. And I luckily get to spend plenty of time on paved racetracks in this wild industry, even managing solid lap times rally crossing a Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato once upon a time, too. I don’t bring up the past to toot my own horn, though, but rather to lay bare where I came up so very far short of what real short course racers can do at tracks like Crandon.

Related: Desert Dominance: How Polaris Pulled Off a SXS Win at Dakar

Meeting Veteran Racer CJ Greaves

There, another highly experienced racer named CJ Greaves served as my coach for a quick session ahead of the weekend’s festivities. I asked Greaves how many races he thinks he’s won at Crandon so far: talk about a local legend. “The win count, I have no idea,” he laughed. “It's a lot. We just crossed the 200 pro wins mark at the last race, in general. So I would say we're well into probably 30 or 40 wins alone right here at Crandon.

“This is my home track,” he admitted. “My dad's been racing here for 35 years, so I've been coming here since I was born, really. Started off racing dirt bikes, used to have a dirt bike show at night. Then when I was 14, moved into the super buggies, full-size vehicles, and been coming ever since.”

CJ led me around the Crandon short course in his own fully prepped Rzr, while I piloted a Pro R “Race Replica Limited Edition”—critically, not a Pro R Factory with a capital "F," which costs $139,999 and ratchets up the durability by a serious notch. Instead, my rig counts as more of an options package with graphics stickers, Method wheels, BFGoodrich tires, and a Rigid light bar. 

Not getting a go in a true Pro R Factory while chasing one felt was a huge bummer, but my Rzr still pumped 225 horsepower with electronic Fox LiveValve suspension, 27 and 29 inches of wheel travel front and rear, and in the case of this two-seater, a ready-to-ride weight probably just over 2,500 pounds with me in the driver’s seat. So not messing around. 

The Importance of Suspension Setup and Tires

To learn more about the differences between Greaves’ setup, a real Pro R Factory, and mine, I quizzed Polaris director of off-road motorsports Alex Scheuerell, who came out to Crandon to provide support for the race teams. “So, for short-course racing, this type of racing, we purely sponsor racers and offer technical support,” he said. “In the desert, it's a little different. Those are our machines, we're the experts, we're down there fully supporting the races at the technical and strategic level.”

I pointed out the tiny tires and slammed suspension on Greaves’ Rzr, which contrasted radically versus my tall BFGs and lifted chassis.

“There's a lot of grip on this track, so it's almost closer to a road tire than an off-road tire,” he explained. “The reason you see them smaller than a desert is because there, you need big tires to go through big obstacles like whoops and washouts and big rocks and stuff like that. You don't see that here. You see jumps, but you don't need a big radius to roll over them with the big radius of the tire. The smaller tire lowers the center of gravity and lowers the rotating inertia so you can stop really fast, accelerate fast, and it helps you with cornering, too.”

Sitting side by side (pun fully intended), my Rzr looked hilariously tall and tippy versus a more spiderwebbed-out race machine. The reinforced roll cage caught my eye, too, and I struggled to push images of rollovers out my mind, which only cropped up more while chasing Greaves around Crandon’s first big, wide lefthander. For the desert driving I’m used to, vision counts as much as anything else—hence Kyle Chaney’s magical success picking lines nobody else even imagines. Keeping the chassis planted while slipping and sliding around at speed carries over to the short course, but with so much grip on a cold, wet morning, the tires just glue to the ground.

Related: Lamborghini Isn’t Done With Off-Road Supercars—and the Sterrato Was Just the Beginning

Fail First to Learn Fast

That sounds ideal for a racecar, but less so in an upright side-by-side. With my BFGs inflated to just 18 psi, I felt the lean angles starting to get risky any time I struggled to initiate a slide. I typically get sideways by hammering the brakes and just throwing a UTV into corners with fairly reckless abandon—as Dakar winner Rokas Baciuška taught me in the Dakar Maverick built by South Racing—and then powering out in as straight a line as possible. But these wide and long sweepers, with so much traction, rendered all of my previous experience absolutely useless.

Instead, I returned to some vague memories of ice driving for a bit. Straighten out the line, shrinking corners by cutting speed and re-accelerating rather than more time drifting—but this didn’t work either. Meanwhile, once my confidence built enough that my speed started to increase a bit, the jumps started to require more attention. 

I tried to keep an eye on Greaves ahead to mimic his throttle modulation. Is he chopping a bit to prevent the hind legs from overstepping the fronts? I wanted to avoid nose-picking and going end over end. At least the early morning start meant the grandstands were still relatively empty. But I could feel Greaves watching me in the rearview, so despite his center of gravity riding so much lower, I determined to follow his line.

Over the jumps, feeling the front and rear suspension travel reach full droop, keying just a bit of throttle to keep my car neutral in mid air, not rebounding into a jump then flying out of the control, I started by bottoming out on most landings. But as long as I prevented from crunching the nose too hard, the Rzr absorbed such abuse with surprising ease, especially when I remembered to push Polaris’s infamous red steering wheel button (certainly not called the “Oh, shit” button by anybody at all) that firms up the shocks for momentary support while landing.

Eventually, I adopted a new strategy that helped me keep up with Greaves slightly better. Namely, just powersliding on throttle far earlier than ever before. I suspect because of all the traction, hammering the gas prompted more squat from the tail, lifting my nose as the all-wheel-drive drivetrain let me steer with my right foot more than the steering wheel itself. Counter to relying on both outside tires to haul through with grip while leaned over, which forces weight over onto the side walls and causes that rollercoaster tippy sensation in my stomach, a successful corner blended relatively straight steering angle with as smooth a line as possible.

Related: The G-Wagen’s Off-Road Skills Are Even Crazier Than You Think

Building Up to Real Speed

Critically, this also prevents any potential rollovers from tucking the front tires into a groove that eventually started to dig into the dirt, which often causes a UTV to bounce up and over the front end. So I found a mild rhythm, essentially hucking in hard without braking too much and feathering some mild countersteer to combat any excessive sideways momentum from ruining my lap times. But then Greaves hopped out of his racer into my driver seat to show me how a real pro gets the job done.

Even the veteran of veterans needed a moment to readjust to the non-prepped Rzr, though. I felt him let off the throttle earlier in the first jump to help flatten out the weight distribution, and very clear timidity going into the first few turns as the chassis started to lift up those inner tires. And this hesitance from a guy who’s run this track about a million times, no less.

After wrapping up his demo laps, Greaves explained how much the side-by-sides, in general—and more specifically how the evolving suspension and tire setup—play into finding speed at a track as tight and grippy as Crandon.

“The UTVs have come a long ways,” Greaves said “There's been many times this year that we actually outqualified Pro 4s with UTVs, which are 180 horse at the wheels and about 2,000 pounds with the driver in it. And then you go to the Pro 4s that are 900 horse and 4,000 pounds, and they're going about the same speed these days.”

“We have an eight-inch minimum ride height rule and we're all pretty dang close,” he confirmed. “We run about nine and a half in the tail of our car and a little bit lower in the front. They're built to be low, to be flat. We have a lot of grip. We come into the turns without a berm or rut, and we rely on the car to stay flat, we rely on whipping the car wide open, and no matter what we're going to do, we want that thing to stay flat, roll through the corner, and just be be able to carry a bunch of speed.”

Despite all those wins, over the course of the rest of the weekend, Greaves ruined my past record of only interviewing an event’s winners. He actually crashed out of all three races, in both UTVs and also his Pro4 truck. Though seeing our new friend out of action dulled the excitement just a bit, such violent racing still piques the adrenaline just fine. The first corner clearly becomes so critical, as drivers try to get ahead of the spray and the wild, desperate, charging group. Then the races became a battle of attrition, separating the wheat from the chaff in sheer survival terms, lap after devastating lap without blinking in the face of double-digits crashes that cropped up in seemingly every heat.

The auditory evidence proved fairly damning, too, as some of the loudest engines I’ve ever heard in the Pro 4 trucks were revealed any time a driver entered a corner without conviction. But mostly, I studied the weight transfer I spent the morning learning all about. Even as everybody rode as wide and low as Greaves, the crashes just piled up (again, pun fully intended). 

Unlike at Baja or the Dakar, mechanical breakdowns happened less often at Crandon. Instead, driver skill and courage came to the fore—most of the cars themselves seemed pretty evenly matched. (Partially because many of the teams use parts and setup that Greaves and his family prep, too). From the grandstands and fields alongside the track, the fans whooped and hollered over the long days of racing, hammering Busch Lights and Bloody Marys as they imagined themselves behind the wheel, jumping the length of football fields, hammering out drifty slides, and countersteering their way to eternal short-course glory.