EDITORS NOTE: Each year, a new season of Snow Goer magazine is kicked off with Q&A interviews with top factory snowmobile engineers, designers and product developer. The goal is to take snowmobile enthusiasts a couple of steps deeper into the design process and the minds of the people who created the new tech. As this story that was first published in the October 2023 issue of Snow Goer is being posted, we’ve editing interviews on new-for-model-year 2025 technology that will appear in our October 2024 issue, which deploys in September. To see them on a timely basis, subscribe to Snow Goer today. In the meantime, enjoy this informative look at Arctic Cats Catalyst chassis that was published last year.

Tech 2024: Arctic Cat’s Catalyst Chassis

The long-awaited new face of Arctic Cat snowmobiles is finally here!

When unveiled at the 2022 Hay Days event last September, the first showing of the Catalyst platform was easily the most-attended public unveiling of a snowmobile in at least three decades. Promises of centralized masses, significant weight reduction, razor-sharp handling and unmatched agility kept the buzz going through the fall and early winter.

Then, starting in January, Cat officials began letting the snowmobile media and select consumers experience 600-class Catalyst ZR, Riot and Mountain Cat machines. The early reviews were overwhelmingly positive.

To gain perspective on the Catalyst development, we turned to Troy Halvorson, Cat’s director of snowmobile product strategy, and Andy Beavis, the engineering manager for mountain snowmobiles. With so much new to talk about with the Catalyst, our biggest problem was narrowing the focus to what would fit in this magazine. Good news, though: A more complete version of the interview will be available on SnowGoer.com (search the word “Catalyst”). 

SG: Take us back to the very beginning: When did the team start dreaming about what would follow the ProCross/ProClimb/Ascender platform? What were the early goals?

TROY HALVORSON: “Right after one platform is released, we’re looking at what’s next. With any new platform there are things that you learn even after the first year that you’d like to correct, and you saw through the ProCross and ProClimb and into the Ascender that we continued to make incremental changes or improvements. During that time, we also had a dedicated team formulating the plan for the next platform.”

ANDY BEAVIS: “A lot of the ideas that ended up in the Catalyst were concepted and talked about even for the F4 [Arctic Cat’s internal name for the ProCross/ProClimb]. Because of our direction at that time, the [ProCross/ProClimb] chassis was built to be able to house pretty much any engine [two-stroke and four-stroke] that we could come up with. There was always the dream or the hope to make a dedicated two-stroke chassis that is tight and right, and everything is built around just those engines. With the Catalyst, that was the plan – make it right for our two-stroke engines and make a platform that is much improved in many ways. [The goal was to] use all the things that we liked from the past 10-12 years, and prior models, as well as new stuff that we couldn’t do right without starting from scratch. It resulted from using the collective knowledge of all the people here working on it. A lot of the Catalyst geometry evolved out of the later ProCross/Ascender chassis. The engine layout ultimately came from the Firecat/M7 days. In my mind, a lot of the vehicle improvements come from being able to take the Arctic Cat laydown two-stroke engine design and build a better sled tightly around it.”

SG: The resulting Catalyst has more centralized masses, tighter bodywork, a tremendous amount of weight loss, updated ergonomics, etc. Were those the specific, early goals or is that something that evolved through the development process?

BEAVIS: “The ergonomics are not really changed much from where we ended on the ProCross/Ascender. The feet/seat/handlebars [positions relative to one another] are almost the same. But we had to change the fuel tank area and a bunch of things to get more narrowness. There is more room to move, and you can get your legs tighter to the center or more forward and sideways when you’re leaning off the side or you’re off-camber. It’s somewhat deceiving when you ride it because you feel all this improvement and difference, but we improved it by giving the rider the same attack stance and more room to reposition themselves to make the vehicle do what you want.

“Whether you’re a snocross rider, or you want aggressive cornering on smooth or bumpy trails, or for mountain riding, you want reaction of the vehicle to the rider. You want the low CG, you want the mass centralization, you want the rider position to be basically the same. The unique thing we did on the Catalyst is we kept that rider interface the same. On the trail sleds we felt they needed more ski pressure and a different balance, especially because of the weight we took out. The rider is in the same spot, but the skis moved through unique front suspension geometry and the track moved back relative to the rider by rotating the belt case. On the mountain Catalyst, the skis, track and rider are in the same place as the Ascender because we dialed-in that balance over the last few chassis revisions, and we didn’t want to stray too far from it. We were able to make the rider interface and ergonomic package work for these different segments by having specialized steering, suspensions, positioning, seats and running boards.”

HALVORSON: “I think the positioning of the A-arms, the drive shaft and the rear suspension and how they all work together in combination was another big part of that. And a lot of that’s learned through racing and through engineers trying different positions. When you hit on the right combination you can work toward it, finesse it and design it into the vehicle. This new Catalyst has hit all those marks so that, when you ride it, it does what you expect it to do.”

SG: What are the challenges and limitations when you talk about designing something that centers the masses?

BEAVIS: “It was a big challenge because, between our different segments, we repositioned the drive shaft for flotation [on mountain sleds] and for bump clearance [on trail sleds]. It kind of goes along with the suspension balance. Mass centralization and CG have been a buzz words since the early 2000s or before. They are numbers that we measure when we move 200 pounds this far to the center and that far down, but you can’t relate to that until you feel it. The improvement is obvious in the riding.

“In terms of challenges, we want all the heavy parts at the center of the sled, but they can’t all be there. On our laydown design, the engine is located as deep inside the chassis as you can get it. The pipe is tightly packed to it, and the fuel load is pushed right up against it. All our competitor’s conventional engines have air boxes and air passages that are lighter parts right in the center of the sled. The laydown engine is our key advantage. The engine block, cylinders, throttle bodies, pipe, clutch, motor mounting, fluids, electrical and everything attached to the engine is centered better in the sled. Then the next big thing is fuel. On the competitors’ sleds, the fuel goes behind the seat and it’s sloshing, which affects your turns, sidehilling, transfer through bumps – any maneuvering, really. We push the fuel right up against the motor. We think we’ve got a pretty advantageous and unique way of doing it because of that laydown [engine] architecture. It is proprietary to us and there are advantages to it that we are now leveraging more than we have in the past.”

HALVORSON: “Anytime you put that much stuff in a very confined area, the challenge is to make sure that the wires are not rubbing on something or nothing’s too close to any heat source. The designers get clever at finding the right locations, trying to put together things that can work with each other.”

BEAVIS: “It’s very complicated. One key of ours is we have a lot of experience here, and a lot of the guys working on the project had 10, 15, 20 or more years. They’ve been through multiple chassis developments. And we have young talent, too. They bring awesome new technologies, ideas, materials, and ways of doing things to a project. Things like the latest computer design analysis and systems that we use, but also having some of us older, more experienced guys to just help guide them so we are always moving forward.”

SG: When riding a Catalyst, we immediately noticed how much lighter the package feels overall. What were the early weight loss goals, and what are examples of areas where you trimmed weight?

BEAVIS: “It’s funny, because Troy was involved in the Firecat and I was very focused on M series in the old days. Much of the desire and theory of what we want from a vehicle hasn’t changed. We want mass centralization with heavy parts in the middle, we want parts that do multiple roles. Ultimately, it’s reduced parts, and use the engineering tools – especially analysis and design tools – to optimize every part, because you don’t lose 20 to 30 to 40 pounds by just doing it in one spot. On the mountain sleds, for example, we’ve been trying to lighten the tracks and skid frames for 20 years. There’s not a lot of meat left on that bone. We had to take it out of places like seats, plastics, chassis and the fuel tank. It’s still a 10.5-gallon tank but people are like, ‘Boy that’s a small fuel tank!’ It’s a very efficient shape. The steering on mountain sleds is another example. It is much simplified, lighter, tighter and stronger with fewer parts and pieces. The ultra-high strength steel tubing that we’re using in the frame, steering and suspension is another. We can make parts thinner, more directly transfer loads through the chassis, package things tighter for better mass centralization, and not sacrifice strength. It’s a little bit of everything everywhere.”

SG: You’d previously told us how an amazing amount of wire came out of the machine. How does one go about
evaluating every inch of wire?

BEAVIS: “A lot of electrical parts had traditionally been re-used, but now we looked at it all and said, ‘We know that there’s room to optimize this with an all-new vehicle.’ [Compared to previous eras] we have so many more sensors and electrical systems with wires and connectors. A lot of the stuff connects to the ECU and the engine, so we put all that we could in a location where the distances [between them] are short, and then re-did the entire harness and routed everything as efficiently as you can. On the first prototype it was 154 feet of individual wire reduced, and a lot of that is just taking a different path between two places or relocating parts. You look at the plugs on a modern ECU and there’s probably 40 or 50 of them, and most of them connect to something more than a foot away. And then there are coils, stator, sensors, fuel system and wires going to the handlebar, etc.”

SG: When we talk about redesigning or reimagining different parts when starting a new chassis, are there a couple of
examples of steps taken about which you’re especially proud?

HALVORSON: “The steering system would be one area. There are two kinds of systems between trail/crossover and the mountain. The progressive steering is on the trail and crossover sleds, that’s something that we’ve been using since the 2005 race sled. We’ve wanted to continue to adapt it to a consumer sled. The mountain sled doesn’t utilize the progressive steering, but it does have a center-line post that utilizes a U-joint to get the vertical post that mountain riders want. Those two systems are very similar but slightly different where they need to be. The other area is the drive shaft location and how we were able to incorporate the same belt case but just by rotating it [we] changed the position of the drive-shaft. That changes the approach angle between the trail/crossover and mountain machines.”

BEAVIS: “We were able to use one drive belt for all three of our ratios with a little bit of adjustment that also allows you to loosen the belt to get it on and off. Another part of it is integrating the belt drive with our TCL [Torque Control Link] system to make it feasible even for a cross-country race sled. That’s a pretty unique function. Belt drives have been around for years, especially in the aftermarket, but to make it feasible for all mountain sleds and especially even for all trail sleds, that was a big fete.”

SG: What were the hurdles that have kept belt-drive systems off production trail sleds for so long?

HALVORSON: “Kirk Hibbert was very skeptical of belt drives because he had companies that said, ‘Hey we’ve got this new belt drive and we want you to try it out. It’s going to work great and be durable.’ But he’d go out and he knew exactly how to break it in the first 50 feet. Even now, with how our Torque Control Link works between our drive and driven clutches and belt case, and all the things we’ve done for the torque loads of our system, there was still some skepticism over whether a belt drive was going to be strong enough. I’ll credit one of our drive team engineers who worked on it, Sam Sandoz. He’s a very smart young guy who came up with a clever idea with belt tensioning. Plus belt technology has gotten better. We did tons of testing and were able to get over that hurdle with how everything works together, from an engine mounting standpoint, from the clutch across to the jackshaft, all of that to where we were collecting belt temperatures and trying to break them and seeing that they are strong.”

SG: How do you balance stripping weight vs. maintaining
durability and the desire to use exotic materials? 

HALVORSON: “Using steel in the front end was a huge part of it. Some people said, ‘Holy cow, you’re going to use steel on your front end? That’s just going to be crazy heavy.’ But the way it was designed we were able to use smaller tubing and maintain strength. That was big. I mean, our chassis itself isn’t way lighter than our ProCross chassis, but the strength is where it needs to be. Everything around it, the idea is to get the weight out of that, but the chassis itself has got to maintain its strength.”

SG: Were there any major hurdles during the development of the Catalyst that were especially hard to clear?

HALVORSON: “The biggest thing we went through on this project was the engine selection. Originally the plan was to go with the larger engine first. But the timeline to do an engine is challenging because there are [sourced parts] that have very long lead times. This new engine that we’ll be talking about at Hay Days was purposely designed for the Catalyst. There were things done with the crankcase that incorporated mass centralization into that design. We were planning to do the 600, but it would have followed [the larger engine]. When we were seeing that some lead times for the components weren’t meeting the timeline, the question was, we either don’t release this snowmobile for another year and wait for the engine, or we move the 600 up and get it in there and then we can release the new platform on time. That was probably the biggest hurdle: getting that 600 ready to be incorporated into the Catalyst, and the guys did a great job. Everything else, like steering and our air intake system, those were things we had done before but now we finessed them. That’s the great thing about not completely changing – we were able to kind of build off each platform to the point where you’re feeling pretty comfortable with the designs.”

SG: Now that the project has been publicly released, what about it makes your team most proud?

HALVORSON: “Our team has been so involved that they’ve had this level of excitement going on for a while now. It started as soon as we introduced it to the public at Hay Days [in 2022]. It’s not just the engineers, it’s our manufacturing, supply chain, service people and more. Everybody has worked together on this project. Now we’re able to show it to people. So, what makes us most proud is that it’s something that we’re seeing such positivity on.”

SG: Obvious, there have been rumors about Arctic Cat’s future in recent years. What does this new Catalyst platform say about Textron’s commitment and the future of Arctic Cat?

HALVORSON: “I can understand people’s concerns. But from an Arctic Cat/Thief River Falls standpoint, we kind of ignored a lot of the talk because we knew what we were doing. We knew that we had a good product roadmap that was going to take a lot of hard work to get done. Textron has given us the investment to make that happen. As long as we put together a good business case for what we’re doing, Textron understands that you have to invest in development to reap the benefits and provide the product that your customers want.”

Editor’s Note: Every Snow Goer issue includes in-depth sled reports and comparisons, aftermarket gear and accessories reviews, riding destination articles, do-it-yourself repair information, snowmobile technology and more. Subscribe to Snow Goer now to receive print and/or digital issues.