The Yamaha Grizzly 700 Experiment

Words: Lance Schwartz
Pictures: Tom Simpson
Video: Corey Dickey, Ron Henry
Test Riders: Lance Schwartz, Corey Dickey

Stop the Presses
After my first ride on the new 2007 Grizzly at Yamaha’s press intro in Montana, I had grand ideas in mind about how we could accentuate the technological wizardry that is hidden within this machine with the help of a very special guest test rider. That was my intent from day one. But, what I hadn’t planned on was the possibility of revealing a horsepower secret that has gone undiscovered since the new Grizzly’s introduction back in June. In addition to these story highlights, we will also take a look at some genuine Yamaha GYTR accessories for Yamaha’s new ferocious entry into the now ultra competitive big bore utility market.

Mr. Grizzly Attends the School of Rock

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Rarely do you see this many smiles on teenagers. I’d say the smiling faces mean the kids liked the Grizzly. Along with our test unit, ATV Scene was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to evaluate some of Yamaha’s genuine GYTR accessories, which were developed specifically for the new Grizzly. We ordered up a set of the oversized aluminum racks, a full aluminum skid plate package, and the new GYTR Grizzly exhaust. Installation time for every part was minimal and effortless. Anyone who has ever bolted up a set of aftermarket aluminum skids knows that they can be uncooperative enough to make a nun spew a litany of profanity capable of making a truck driver blush. No foul language needed here. I’m very happy to report that I installed all seven Yamaha skid plates in about 30 minutes. They required no special coaxing or manipulation with a “BFH” to muscle them into place. The exhaust installation was also fairly straight-forward and easy, although it does requires you pop off a few pieces of the plastic on the left side. A monkey could bolt both front and rear racks on in less time than it would take him to eat a banana and throw a wad of poop at the crowd of test riders waiting for him to finish. I purposely installed all of these parts without looking at the directions that Yamaha supplied. I never once felt like throwing any of the parts or pushing the Grizzly off a cliff, so that means the parts were engineered well enough that even folks too stubborn to read directions can pull off without going postal.

The GYTR skids and racks add a level of class and protection to the big Grizzly.

The larger racks add carrying capacity without taking away from the excellent ergonomics

The stock undercarriage offers protection, but nothing like the Baja-ready armor available from GYTR.But, how in the world do you effectively test racks, skids, and exhausts for an OEM with more capabilities, technology and brains than I’ll ever have? Here’s what I came up with. Getting the opportunity to write and test ride for a company like ATV Scene has been a dream come true. Most people don’t know this, but my real J-O-B is a 7th grade math and science teacher at a middle school in Central Pennsylvania. As a class project, we decided to build a really cool pond and wetlands area outside of my classroom. At about the time we began our planning process, my long term Grizzly arrived. I spent countless hours trying to decide how to properly evaluate the racks and skid plates that Yamaha sent us. When I found out we would have to move, by hand, about ten tons of large river rock, it struck me. So, I loaded up project Grizzly, gave it a pocket protector and took it to school. You can imagine how excited the kids were to see Mr. Grizzly show up for class. We overloaded the front and rear racks with hernia inducing rocks and towed a trailer full of several hundred pounds of these geological behemoths through foot deep mud and ruts for nearly 7 hours. The Grizzly 700 never skipped a beat. Even with the machine in four wheel drive with the front diff locked and several hundred pounds of rocks on the front rack, rear rack and behind it in a trailer, the steering effort was minimal thanks to the EPS power steering unit. The accessory aluminum racks allow a lot more cargo to be hauled, plus they look very cool while doing it. The addition of the skid plates allowed us to climb up, around, over and through any obstacle without the fear of damaging the running gear. One other point to note about the skid plates is they did not have a tendency to pack excess mud in the A arm plates like many of the aftermarket products do. This eliminates the tendency for mud and rocks to tear up the delicate CV boots.

Lending a Hand, and Arm
The difference between the stock and GYTR skid plates becomes very apparent from this angle.Creating this article was very special to me. It’s not very often that a guy in his mid thirties still hangs out with his closest childhood friend. Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, Corey Dickey and myself burned up the streets of Trevorton, Pennsylvania on our Huffy bikes. We played little league baseball together and we also both played football for the Trevorton Colts youth football team.

As we grew older, Corey went on to become a stellar wrestler in high school, placing 5th in the Pennsylvania state wrestling finals as a senior. While growing up, both Corey and I had also gotten into riding dirt bikes and ATV’s. Corey owned a sweet 1989 Honda TRX 250R and a 1990 Suzuki QuadRacer 250. He learned how to bludgeon those machines on the anthracite coal hills of Central Pennsylvania, much in the same way little kids in the area like Chris Borich, Traci Cecco and Jason Dunkelberger did in their youth. It’s cool, because we all grew up in within a 10 square mile radius of one another.

My friend Corey Dickey lost the use of his left arm. Good news for Corey…. Yamaha’s Grizzly with Electronic Power Steering has allowed him to ride ATVs again.Anyone who knows Corey can attest to the fact that he has always been one of the physically and mentally strongest people they’ve ever known. His older brother Larry actually ran over Corey, who was aboard his Suzuki RM80, with a Volkswagen Beetle. Corey screamed out that his leg was broken. But, Larry, the elder by three years, slapped Corey around and told him to quit faking it. So Corey got back up, kick started his RM80, and drove home. It turns out Corey wasn’t faking it. His leg was severely broken, which seemed to be about right after being mowed down by his brother’s Volkswagen.

Things couldn’t have been going any better for Corey. But, in July of 1992, things nearly came to an end for him. It seems nearly impossible that there could be something worse than being hit by a car. Corey will be the first to tell you there is, in fact, something much worse. You see, Corey was actually hit by a train traveling in excess of 50 mph. Now you see lots of stuff on TV about cars being hit by trains because they’ve stalled on the tracks. Well, it happened a lot like that for Corey, but his story is missing the minor detail of a car being involved in the story. In what may be the most freak accident I’ve ever heard of, he was accidentally hit by this train, with no car to serve as a protective barrier. The collision broke almost every bone in his body, including his femur, both legs and both arms. His pelvis was broken in nine places and his skull was cracked. There were numerous other injuries that made his survival nearly impossible. Through pure determination and his insatiable desire to never give up, Corey fully recovered from all but one injury. The collision caused Corey to be thrown over 50 feet in the air. When he landed, he came to rest, shoulder first, on a separate train track. This landing sealed Corey’s fate. From that point on, he no longer had any feeling in his left arm. It was paralyzed.

Here’s a look at the ATV industry’s first-ever power steering unit! Yamaha’s EPS (Electric Power Steering) is innovative to say the least. One ride on a new Grizzly and you’ll agree, this is no gimmick. Nearly 14 years later, we remain closer friends than ever. But, throughout that time, there were a lot of things Corey had to learn to do differently with the use of only one arm. One of Corey’s favorite things to do was ride quads. But, with one arm, it is really hard to ride safely while still trying to maintain control of the machine. After riding the Grizzly in Montana, I made a phone call to Corey that would change his life for the better. With the advent of power steering on a quad, I immediately knew Corey would again be able to ride. It wasn’t until we actually put him on the machine that we would realize how well the Grizzly’s new power steering actually was.

We were able to document Corey’s first trip on the 2007 Yamaha Grizzly with EPS. The video puts his experience into words that I could never write in a paragraph, so do yourself a favor and check it out the video at the top of this page.

Even in stock form the 2007 Grizzly looks like a million bucks.

 

Yamaha offers FREE power increases

Having done some modifications on previous fuel injected quads, I have become intimately familiar with the workings of fuel modules like those from Dobeck and the PowerCommander from Dynajet. If you’ve recently gone and purchased one of these units for your new Grizzly, please bend over and ask someone close to you to give you a swift kick in the ass! The crew at ATV Scene has made a pretty incredible discovery and we’re proud to be the first to announce our findings to the world. Now aren’t you glad you decided to read this article?

What if I told you there was a way to increase the performance of your new 2007 Grizzly by 16% without making a phone call or spending a dime? It turns out that by following a very precise procedure of pushing buttons on the LCD gauge pod, you can raise or lower the amount of fuel being dumped into the cylinder of the Yamaha Grizzly, and by doing so, increase horsepower. Our Grizzly came from the factory with a setting of “0”. But we discovered that this setting can be raised to a maximum setting of “126”.

For our test, we setup an eighth mile drag race and began to play with the settings. On the opposite end of the drag strip was an accurately calculated radar gun. As a baseline test and in stock form with only the GYTR exhaust and a setting of “0”, we were only able to hit 51mph by the end of the eighth mile strip. As we raised the amount of fuel by adjusting the settings in the instrument panel, we progressively picked up speed. At the conclusion of the test, we were actually able to increase the speed to the end of the eighth mile to 59mph, which is an increase of 16%. At this hotter setting, the Grizzly definitely made more horsepower. The rear tires clawed for traction while the fronts got catapulted towards the sky. It was an incredibly important discovery and our hats are off to Yamaha for actually making this process possible.

Below is a table detailing our findings.

Test Facility Details:
Slight uphill grade on concrete	47 degrees F
1/8th mile	GYTR exhaust
Stock air filter and box	Accurately calculated radar gun
Cumulative Results:
Hit Rev limiter at 62mph on radar (65mph per dash readout)	Gain of 8 mph — 16% increase in speed for FREE!
MultiMeter Display Fuel Setting	Maximum Speed in mph
0	51
20	54
40	54
60	57
80	57
100	59
120	59
126	59

For the record, you should try this modification at your own risk. We have nearly 200 miles on our test mule with this modification and everything is still copasetic. One downside to adding fuel to this machine is when we got up closer to a setting of 100, it increased the Grizzly’s tendency to stall at idle for no apparent reason. In order to make the most horsepower, you need to flow more fuel and more air. Unfortunately, as of this date, no companies had an aftermarket air filter available for this machine, so it is likely that the stalling was occurring because the Grizzly was wheezing for more oxygen. More airflow is also a guaranteed increase in horsepower. So, when aftermarket filters become available, more acceleration should easily occur. We’ll leave it up to the readers to finish this experiment and discuss their findings in our forums.

One point worth noting in this experiment was that regardless of the increase in fuel our top speed of 62mph (clocked with our radar gun, 65mph displayed on the dash) remained the same. However, as we said, the gains we received coming out of the hole were very impressive. The Grizzly was on the rev limiter hard whether the fuel was set on the stock setting or our modified setting. The machine definitely had the power to go faster, but Yamaha wisely placed a rev limiter on the engine to keep idiots like the crew at ATV Scene from cooking the motor. Besides, its my belief that we really don’t need 600+ pound utility machines going much faster than this anyway.

 

The stock lights did an excellent job of lighting up the woods for night time trail riding.The Future is Right Before Our Very Eyes

I love the new 2007 Yamaha Grizzly 700. The power steering clearly has so many advantages over any other setup in existence. I’m sure Yamaha’s intent was never to build a machine that a one armed man could ride safely, but they did. I’m also not sure if Yamaha intended to design a modifiable fuel system that could actually be tweaked by the owner to increase horsepower, but they certainly pulled that one off too. These two qualities may likely have been an accident, but I wish the other manufacturers would take note and have similar accidents with their future models as well. As technology advancements in the automotive industry continue, I look to the ATV manufacturers to grasp that new technology and incorporate it into our industry. Making a machine go 100 miles per hour is not something I see as important. But, allowing a six hundred pound machine to traverse gnarly obstacles at trail riding speed without crashing is immensely important to me. The addition of power steering is definitely good enough to save a rider from a crash, even if he only has the use of one arm. So, two muddy thumbs up to the engineers at Yamaha for their hard work and ability to see what consumers will expect in the future. They certainly made an awesome machine out of the 2007 Yamaha Grizzly 700. But, more important to me than that, they helped fulfill a dream by giving my good buddy Corey the ability to enjoy quads again!

 

2007 Yamaha Grizzly 700 FI 4×4 Specs
ENGINE
Engine Type	686cc, 4-Stroke Single, Liquid Cooled w/ Fan, SOHC
Bore x Stroke	102mm x 84mm
Compression Ratio	9.2:1
Carburetion	Yamaha Fuel Injection (YFI), 44mm
Starting System	Electric
Transmission	Yamaha Ultramatic V-Belt / H,L,N,R,P featuring all-wheel engine braking
Drive Train	Yamaha On-Command push button 3-way locking differential, 2WD, 4WD, locked 4WD; Shaft
SUSPENSION
Front	Independent Double Wishbone, 7.1” w/ 5-way Preload Adjustment.
Rear	Independent Double Wishbone, 9.5” w/ 5-way Preload Adjustment.
BRAKES
Front	Dual Hydraulic Disc
Rear	Dual Hydraulic Disc
TIRES
Front	AT25x8-12 w/ Aluminum Wheels
Rear	AT25x10-12 w/Aluminum Wheels
DIMENSIONS
LxWxH	81.3”x46.5”x48.8”
Seat Height	35.6”
Wheel Base	49.2”
Turning Radius	126”
Ground Clearance	11.8”
Fuel Capacity	5.3 Gallons
Dry Weight	602 Lbs
Rack Capacity	99 Lbs.Fr. / 187 Lbs. Rr.
Towing Capacity	1,212 Lbs.
OTHER
Instrumentation	Digital LCD Multi-function display. Speedo, Odo, Dual Trip, Hour, Clock, Fuel, and Gear Position
Lighting	Dual 35W Halogen Multi-reflector Headlights & 21/5W Brake light

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