Polaris RZR MasterCraft Seats - Strapping Yourself In

When you start working your UTV a little harder than it was designed for in stock form, you might find your stock seats to be a bit inadequate. The seats in our Polaris RZR were actually pretty nice, but once we put on a long-travel kit, it took our RZR's ability to a new level, and the stock seats and belts were no longer holding us in place.

MasterCraft has been building seats for trucks and buggies for years, and now they've dipped into the UTV market, offering seats and adapter brackets to fit them in Rhinos and RZRs. We got a set of Sportsman seats to see if we could improve our butt placement in hard corners from now on. If our bodies could stay in place better behind the wheel, then we can better control our UTV.

All Industries Performance (AIP) in Northridge, California, was able to get our seats and restraints in for us in less than an hour. Installing seats and belts in your UTV is fairly simple and requires no special tools.

What Did We Think?

We really hammered through some whoop sections and into some tight corners to see how our spinal cords and butts would take it. The MasterCraft seats definitely kept our bodies in place during rough maneuvering, and the added cushion was welcomed. Control of the UTV was also improved, as we were no longer moving around in the seats.

There is only so much a performance seat can do though, and we still got into some sections that left our backs feeling a little sore, so don't expect absolute miracles, but rather definite improvements.

The factory seat bases are reused for the MasterCraft seats. They have two ears that hold them in place in back and a pin-style quick-release for the front.Tom from AIP first bolted on MasterCraft's adapter bracket before bolting on the stock seat base.	In just a few minutes, Tom had our seat snapping into place. It's a fairly tight fit, as the Sportsman seats are bigger than the stockers and barely clear the surrounding plastic of the RZR body.	The factory three-point belts are removed, as they are really no longer necessary. Many times, we leave our factory belts in our rides, even with new harnesses for ease of everyday driving, but since the RZR is purely an off-road vehicle, we didn't feel we needed the stock belts any longer.
The new MasterCraft restraints bolted into the factory belt-mounting points. Since the seats go in so quickly, installing the belts actually takes longer than installing the seats.	The Sportsman seats turned out really nice and gave us a custom look in our UTV.	The MasterCraft five-point harness restraints use 2-inch straps and work perfectly in our smaller UTV. We decided not to go with the submarine strap (the fifth point) for preservation reasons. Submarine straps come straight between your legs close to your crotch and keep you from sliding under the lap-belt straps during a sudden stop. But we felt safe enough using only the four-points in our UTV and not endangering our junk.If we were racing, we'd probably use the fifth strap ... and a cup.