Remember the days when going 60 miles per hour on a stock personal watercraft was outright insane? Yeah, we remember those days too. Well, when today’s stock machines need to be detuned just so that they stay somewhere close to the USCG-mandated 67-ish max speed cap, you know that there’s a lot left to unlock. That has been the theme behind Greenhulk.net’s newest project Yamaha, a 2017 GP1800. Greenhulk’s Jerry Gaddis picked up the blue-and-white GP1800 only a couple of weeks ago and he hasn’t let any grass grow beneath his feet.
After installing a secondary digital tachometer and giving the ski a coat of Velocity Visions ceramic coating, he went right to work breaking in the engine, for y’know, about .8 hours. With his son at the throttle, the GP hit 71 on GPS, but as Jerry writes, “the limiter kicks in and drags it right back down to 69 mph.” Reaching into his bag of tricks, Jerry produced a RIVA Racing MaptunerX ready with a reflash ECU tune ready to be uploaded into the ski. The handheld tuner from RIVA walked him through the different prompts, withdrew and saved the factory tune, and replaced it with the optimized tune almost instantly.
Jerry writes, “Minutes after tuning the ski easily pulled 79.2 mph at 8300 RPM. This is bone stock, no mods and just the tune. The acceleration is brutal! Yes, [it’s] still bone stock, [the] impeller [has] not [been] tweaked, [or the] ride plate. [This is] fresh out the Yamaha crate and only a MaptunerX tune. I’m amazed! [I] can’t wait to see what this thing will do once I start adding mods.” Near 80mph runs is an incredible feat for an otherwise untouched machine and a little hard to believe were it not for the GPS-documented video HERE:
As Jerry teases, “Stay tuned, guys! Much better speeds [are] to come once mods are added. You can follow the build progress of the ski right here on this thread.”
