The great Lotus designer Colin Chapman once remarked, "Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere. Simplify, then add lightness."
I know many enthusiasts have heard the last part of the quote many times before, but I wanted to detail the whole quote because I think it's the same thinking that brought the Can-Am Maverick R to life. And, indeed, all go-fast UTVs.
See, the top dawgs of the desert racing scene have always been the trophy trucks. They're these behemoths of machines, with 1,000 horsepower V8s weighing in at over 3 tons and have more suspension travel than there are grains of sand on Earth. Or at least they were top dawgs, as in recent years, both Polaris and Can-Am have built faster, lighter, and more nimble machines built to dominate where trophy trucks once reigned supreme. The companies understood power made them faster on straights, and cutting weight made them faster everywhere else.
But why not both?
Thus, the current crop of go-fast UTVs was born, with the current champion being the Can-Am Maverick R, which not only was put to the test and came out on top at this year's King of the Hammers, but Wonder Boy himself, aka Travis Pastrana, recently took the machine to the desert and pitted it against his own trophy truck. You're gonna want to watch this.
According to Pastrana, he constantly gets "letters" from Can-Am saying that he can't do certain things with his Mavericks, i.e. donuts on pavement, up on two wheels, jumping over triples, etc, etc, etc. I'd, personally, call that the hazard of sponsoring someone like Travis Pastrana, but hey, I'm not Can-Am nor one of the brand's lawyers.
But, Pastrana says, taking his Can-Am Maverick R xRS into the desert and rallying the heck out of it against a purpose-built trophy truck is exactly what the Maverick R is made for. It's made to conquer dunes. It's made to humiliate fields of KOH buggies and machines. It's made to blast through the desert at high speeds, but do so in a way that even you or I could control it.
So what does Travis do? Well, he fulfills his contract duties by finally towing the company line and showing the true capabilities of this insane machine. And, well, the outcome is probably what you'd expect at this point from a 240-horsepower turbocharged mini trophy truck.
And from the video, you can really see the line between Colin Chapman's ideology and the Maverick R. If you can't, you might need glasses.
