Mudding the Can-Am Maverick X Ds 1000R Turbo to the Breaking Point

The Honda Odyssey was ahead of its time. I’m not talking about the minivan, but the first Odyssey, which was an awesome little dune buggy. (Strangest name reappropriation ever, Honda!) Back when ATVs were still in their infancy, Honda built what would now be called a UTV, essentially an ATV with a steering wheel, a bucket seat and a roll cage.

That machine never really caught on, but the genre it spawned is now big business: everyone from Arctic Cat to Kubota makes a side-by-side, and each year these buggies become ever more powerful, quick and expensive. It was inevitable that someone would build one with a factory turbocharger, and BRP got there first with the Can-Am Maverick X Ds 1000R Turbo. Equipped with a 121 hp, 976-cc V-twin, it’ll till your field at 82 mph. Base price: $22,099.

I take the Maverick to a weekend-long off-road bacchanalia at Outback ATV Park in Laurinburg, N.C. I’m not sure whether it’s called Mud-Fest or Mudapalooza or the Mudtacular Mudathon, but the gist is this: 300 or so ATVs and side-by-sides, getting up to all sorts of hijinks. The 700-acre property features a motocross course, a dirt drag strip and a mud race track—which is laid out like a road course, if the road were buried beneath a layer of soupy mud interspersed with deep water holes. There are also miles of trails and a pond where I learn that ATVs can be fitted with such enormous tires that your four-wheeler will float, turning it into a small, unstable boat.

I’d kind of assumed that I’d have the baddest machine at Outback, what with my four-wheel-drive, auto-locking front diff and 15 to 16 inches of travel out of Fox Racing suspension. Plus, you know, the turbo. But pretty immediately I notice that hardly anybody has a stock machine, with huge tires and jacked-up suspension being the norm. People have stereos and aftermarket turbos and beefy winches. The side-by-side, it seems, is but a blank palette upon which the modern outdoorsman sketches the vision of his all-terrain desire, which is certainly louder and faster and ballsier than anything you find straight out of the showroom.