By: Mark Lester
It’s been an incredible start to winter in Central, Ontario with two full weeks of riding already logged right from the Supertrax Cave.
Of interest to visitors to supertraxmag.com will be our initial impressions of some 09 sleds.
We’ll begin with the Ski-Doo MX-Z 600 E-TEC Renegade Adrenaline. As of yesterday the sled has 225 miles on the odo and it is more than three hours clear of the ECU “clock” which limits performance and economy until break-in is complete.
Yesterday we rode from Minden to Fenelon Falls on the abandoned rail-line including some ditch running there and back.
The trip totaled just under 70 miles and after refilling the E-Tec and crunching numbers I’m comfortable reporting the sled averaged 23.5 mpg on the trip.
Okay, this wasn’t lake honing or full throttle running but it was brisk trail riding. This mpg compares favorably with numbers we saw last year.
Here’s what’s more interesting. About a week ago we were tipped off by Ski-Doo regarding production E-Tec’s and an increase in power.
The insiders at SD were 100% correct. There’s a marked improvement in both mid-range and in particular, top end pull from the E-Tec.
With this improvement came a slight upward movement on the EPA’s NER hang tag number for 600 E-Tec’s. Our concern was whether or not this would impact mpg. Apparently it has not.
Over the weekend we were able to sample our Polaris 600 SP (we’ll report on it later this week) and compare it with the E-TEC for power.
The SP is not broken in yet so our impressions will change. However, we did feel the E-TEC was noticeably improved against the SP 600 CleanFire form last year’s testing.
Again, it’s a little early to draw conclusions using this early data. Looks like E-Tec is still the real thing.
