How Do You Break In a Polaris RZR 900 Drive Belt?

Breaking in drive belts for a Polaris side-by-side is comparable to doing a break-in for the brakes in that you should run them hard and then let them cool down.

Partzilla’s powersports expert John Talley hosts live Q&A sessions on our YouTube channel every Friday at 3pm Eastern. In this edition, John gives his advice on how to break in the drive belt for a Polaris RZR 900 UTV.

Polaris RZR 900 drive belt

How do you properly break in a drive belt on a 2018 Polaris RZR 900?

John Talley: I believe we did a video on that … where I talk about CVT belts and how to break them in properly. But my quick word of advice is just it’s almost like breaking in an engine. You want to vary the speed and the amount of, I don’t want to say torque, but the amount of work that you’re having the belt do. You want the belt to go through its full range of expanding and contracting in between the two sheaves, multiple times. Almost to the point of overheating but not quite. But once you’ve really run it that hard, then let it sit for a couple of hours at least, cool back down and that way it’ll be ready to rock. I like to compare it to bedding in brakes on a higher performance system. You go ahead and run them hard until they’re almost glowing, and then you just let them cool down naturally. And that process of bedding them in more or less transfers some the brake material into the rotor, but in this case we’re talking about embedding some of the belt itself into the sheaves. That way it’s got something to grab onto, because if you rush that process or work the belt too hard from the get-go, it’ll glaze it over and it doesn’t grip as well, and of course it won’t last as long.