As we moved into the 2014-2015 winter season there was a lot of pressure on us to develop a Barker's Exhaust system for the new Yamaha SR Viper snowmobile. After finding such huge success with the Slip On system that we produced for the highly acclaimed Yamaha Nytro, we knew the bar was set pretty high for us to perform. The way the Nytro was designed it truly loved our reverse megaphone design, so much so that after proper tuning we easily achieved 8-10 horsepower that most people couldn't believe came from just a slip on.
We couldn't wait to get our hands on this new Viper. Once we had the machine in our shop we knew that we had our work cut out for us. Instead of a rear exit as with the Nytro the new Viper had a bottom side exit with a sharp 180 in the header under the gas tank. We also had a lot of pressure from dealers and customers to go beyond a slip on and produce a full Barker's system for the Viper. We knew this would be a challenge.
The slip on design came easily and fit very nicely under the hood, drastically reducing the weight by removing the stock canister. The header we found really had no options that were going to be much different from the stock header due to how tight it fit under the gas tank. We made the decision and felt that the only real answer was to make a very similar header but Hand Made using our extremely skilled Tig guys instead of a production stock header. We could see that there was definitely some restriction and we knew ours would be cleaner and flow much better than stock.
After producing our 3 into 1 header that used a flat collector just before the 180 and turning the corner up to our reverse megaphone and muffler we were extremely excited to get it on the dyno. Pat Hauck from Hauck Powersports was so kind to do the runs for us and let us know how things went. What we found is that our Slip On did great and produced 4-6 horsepower after tuning. But we were extremely let down as the header honestly did nothing to that sled...
As we moved back to the drawing board with our tail between our legs we were a little nervous. We were starting to think that Yamaha has this motor running extremely efficient and we were unsure if there were going to be any other ponies left on the table for us to squeeze out of it without having to drastically change other components. Our engineers were not going to give up that easily though and it wasn't long before our R&D came up with something different. Instead of coming back together from the 3 into 1 prior to the 180 we wanted to get the exhaust a little more time to flow before it ran into the other cylinders. After some extensive fixturing due to the extremely tight tolerances we had to hold due to fit we were able to come up with a header that used a triangular collector way farther down closer to our can and megaphone.
Our sled was now headed back to Hauck for more testing. Fingers crossed and although we were very confident there was still concern on this new design. To our liking we got the call from Pat saying you nailed it this time! Thanks to our great staff and TOP NOTCH lead welder we had produced our first full Header System in the Snowmobile market. We think you'll find limitless possibilities with this new header after proper tuning and other mods.
Our goal is to always try to maximize what can be done with an exhaust and tuning alone. This way people are not forced to buy other mods just to make the exhaust work. Don't get us wrong though, we always have those "Big Build" guys in mind and in almost all cases riders find that after installing the Barker's other modifications have even more potential than before.
