Utter Nutters
If you own a farm, live in the countryside or near the coast, this is for you. In keeping with Honk’s fastidious tradition of being just crazy, we’d like to present an instrument of absolute hilarity, mayhem and abject lunacy, not seen outside of a mental institution — the Polaris 500 Scrambler.
Until I spent a day with the Scrambler, I hated quads. Primarily because the only one I’d ever ridden until then was on a beach and on honeymoon, with my wife on the back seat. That particular quad, called the Ginseng Hakka Noodles (or something), was a horrible, unbalanced, hopeless piece of Chinese under-engineered excrement that only went to the right. Which was bad for us because that’s where the sea was.
So you’ll forgive me if I was a little apprehensive to begin with. First things first, get the gear on. Armour. Elbow pads. Gloves. Helmet. Check. I started out with the 90cc kiddie-quad to learn the track.
The difference was obvious straightaway, primarily because it could go straight and left as well. Still, 20 minutes on this mosquito helped me learn the track, specifically built to showcase the capabilities of Polaris’s quads and buggys.
Quads, for motorbicyclists are a little counter intuitive. You lean into a corner on a bike. But on a quad, you turn the handlebar in the direction you want it to go whilst your head points to the direction of travel and your behind points in the opposite direction. Rickshaw drivers will know what I’m talking about.
Still, time to start with the boys. The next one on my agenda was the 200 Phoenix. This is a racing quad with full-time four-wheel drive and an automatic gearbox. But apart from the throttle being where you’d expect to find the engine start button on your bike, it had the back brake on the left and the front brake on the right like any bike.
After tearing it up on this for an hour or so, I found out that all mental donuts I needed to do was the front brake and the throttle. What followed were more one-handed donuts than Dunkin could scoff at. And it was so easy that even our photographer had a go and pulled it off.
With the afternoon sun burning down, it was time for the big one; the 500 Scrambler. This is a big, man-sized super-quad. The seating position is much higher than it is on the Phoenix. And that single-cylinder 500cc petrol motor makes 32bhp and a million torques. Probably.
This one felt a little more grown up; a little more serious. All that changed when I found that it had a button which allows you to switch between rear and four-wheel drive. And that means just one thing to the petrolhead — drifting.
If you can stab at the front brake at exactly the right time while you’re on the throttle, you can hold a drift for days. And in the empty field next to the track, I made even bigger circles around the smaller donut circles I’d made earlier. I wonder if they looked like crop circles from above.
At this point, I was given a challenge. I was asked if I could jump this 400-kilo quad on the very short straight. This was really hard because no matter how many brave pills I took and how much speed I carried through the last corner, I couldn’t get this heffer off the ground.