Who in their right mind could turn down an offer to test Teixeira Tech's freshly developed 540 Polaris Outlaw IRS? Not us! If you're not familiar with Teixeira Tech, founder Ed Teixeira is a hard-core desert racer who competes in the SCORE off-road racing series and has won the Best In The Desert Expert Championship in 2003 and 2007. Teixeira Tech is best known for its extremely tough ground-clearance-styled, high-performance A-arms.
This particular Teixeira Outlaw was developed for East Coast GNCC-style racing. With that in mind Teixeira wanted to improve some very important performance capabilities. The priorities would be improving handling performance without adding width, gaining wheel travel and upping horsepower to get this big girl up the trail in a hurry all while making it as comfortable for the driver as possible.
Thanks to the suspension improvements...
Thanks to the suspension improvements of Teixeira arms and Fox Shox, this machine can now better handle the hard hits of rough terrain and harsh landings.
Making Power
Teixeira shipped the motor to CT Racing to work its magic as Ed had raced a custom-chassis KTM 525-powered contraption that he built several years ago in the Best In The Desert Series, which is the same motor as our Outlaw. CT Racing built his motors then along with a custom pipe for the conversion. He supplied CT with a factory KTM 540 kit, which comes from KTM with a piston kit, cylinder and top end gasket set. CT went to work porting the head, which dramatically improved the flow characteristics and the CFM's. When CT Racing ports the heads it does a CNC valve job even on a new motor such as this. The five-angle valve job completely reprofiles the valve seat, significantly changing the flow characteristics. CT then slipped in a Web cam all while maintaining stock valve springs. There is no reason to bump up the spring and seat pressure when using a bottom to midrange camshaft for XC type racing.
CT Racing then pimped out the 39mm FCR carburetor and installed an R&D Power Bowl to it. The R&D Power Bowl includes a significantly stiffer-than-stock accelerator pump spring. The bowl includes an accelerator pump that has the venting higher up allowing the bowl to hold more fuel, which pump-squirts more fuel over a longer duration. The pump features a tunable leak jet that you simply turn a screw with your fingers to fine-tune the bottom-end jetting. The pump lets you stab the throttle without any hesitation while the float bowl stops the bogging from G-out situations. CT drills out the accelerator pump squirt diameter and mods the accelerator shaft slightly retarding the pump timing and then installed its FCR titanium needle along with a richer pilot and main jet.
At this point, CT installed its Sonic pipe, which uses a disc-type spark arrestor system. In fact, CT has won several pipe shootouts over the years using this system, even bringing the most horsepower over the widest power curve in our own Raptor 700 pipe shootout back in 2006. The disc system makes the CT exhaust tunable for noise. If you have a sound requirement you need to meet, you can simply remove discs to get to the decibel setting you need.
Improving The Handling
The folks at Teixeira Tech built a set of ground-clearance A-arms for the front end of our Outlaw. They repositioned the shock mount farther out to offer a better ratio and better anti-roll stability. Teixeira's upper A-arm has the easiest-to-use caster adjustment system on the market. Plates on each side of a slotted upper arm have teeth in them similar to what you would find on Vise-Grip teeth. To adjust the caster you simply loosen the upper ball joint forward or backward. Adjusting camber is the same as well. In our opinion, it's a very simple and ingenious innovation.