Watch a Modded Snowmobile Keep Up With a Hayabusa at the Drag Strip
Bored out carburetors, nitrous oxide, and 112-octane race gas? Say no more.
Motorsport's origins are fairly straightforward; one person had a thing with an engine, so did someone they knew, and one of them said to the other, "bet mine's faster." We've rolled with that since then, competing with one another in everything from cars to motorcycles, planes, and apparently, even snowmobiles, some of which have been so heavily modified they can keep up with the most mythical motorcycle out there; the Suzuki Hayabusa.
One such snowmobile is the 1999 Ski-Doo Mach Z 800 owned by Wisconsinite Brian Lamb, who has heavily modified his for drag racing on asphalt (and maybe other surfaces too). This naturally involved not just swapping its steering skids for wheels, but enhancing its 809-cc Rotax inline-three, which, because it's a two-stroke, is rated at 148 horsepower from the factory. In Lamb's Ski-Doo, it's producing far more, however, with carburetors reportedly bored from 38 mm out to 40.5, a 60-horsepower shot of nitrous oxide, and to take advantage of these, 112-octane race gas.
Napkin math suggests its true output is easily 210 horsepower, probably more, so it's little surprise this strange racing vehicle can go neck-and-neck with the superlative Suzuki superbike.
On the better of the two passes shown in the video below, Lamb nails a 1.54-second 60-foot run, or four-tenths up on that shockingly quick Ford Flex we watched flog a Ram TRX last week. He goes on to record a 6.63-second eighth-mile pass at 97 mph, less than a tenth off the Hayabusa's best-depicted pass of 6.54 seconds.
Seeing as Lamb's 60-foot time is quicker than that of a stock Mach Z 800 as recorded on Drag Times, and his eighth-mile time six-tenths quicker, it stands to reason his Ski-Doo is easily a second swifter than the 11.7-second stock Mach Z, making it a 10-second snowmobile.
So, next time you owe someone a pink slip for a 10-second car, surprise them with something they can enjoy in the snow too. Geez, what a strange start to the now-endless F&F franchise that would've been.
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