Spied! Never-Before-Seen RIVA Racing Gear on Dean’s Team Yamahas

There’s something about race day that brings out the best (and sometimes the worst) in competition. If this weekend’s massive Hydro-Turf Pro Watercross Tour stop in Panama City Beach, Florida showed us anything, it’s that Yamaha is charging this year’s Pro Runabout Stock, Limited and Open classes with guns blazing.

For those on the beach this weekend, there was no escaping the big red-and-white Yamaha tent that housed Troy Snyder, Brian Baldwin and the Aswar brothers, Aero and Aqsa. United under the Yamaha banner, all four riders are part of Dean Charrier’s legendary “Dean’s Team,” which enjoys the perks of a very close relationship with RIVA Racing.

Reports state that the partnership is part sponsorship and part research and development, as the Dean’s Team riders provide the part’s developer irreplaceable first-hand input in addition to pushing each component to its very limit. With many of Yamaha’s marketing team on hand, as well as a guest engineer from Japan and the effervescent Scott “Hollywood” Watkins, all eyes were on the water.

It was leaked to The Watercraft Journal that while individual setups varied from rider to rider, all of the Dean’s Team FZRs touted some secret RIVA Racing hardware, including preproduction adjustable sponsons and a whole new, low-slung billet steering system. We spied at Snyder’s Judge Motorsports’ tuned FZR and eyed a very unique billet offset that pushed the bars forward on the new stainless neck.

But what was most intriguing was word of the skis running the new RIVA/Vipec V88R3 ECU. The next generation in engine controller software, the RIVA/Vipec is expected to offer significantly sharper throttle response, mapping capabilities and engine knock prevention (among many more features that are soon to be released to the public in the next coming weeks).