It's not just the rpms, for sure. My belt has been squealing bad upon crank up no matter how loose or tight I run it, and you can tell it's slipping a little while turning the steering wheel. It's almost like the pump or something else is harder for the belt to turn than it should be, that belt had teeth on it (or grooves, not teethed like for cogs.) when I put it on last year, now it is a solid smooth v-belt, teeth worn off. Put it on last year, but has only had roughly 10 rides on it since then and has already wore all the teeth off. Had a smooth v-belt on it before and it started not working good, so I swapped to teeth to try it out. Worked good until all the teeth were ate off of it, now it sucks.
It was doing a new thing on the way out of the woods Saturday night though. It was hanging up at certain positions while turning, on easy simply terrain. Like it would turn easy then get really hard to turn, yank it past that point, then easy to turn again. It was right inline with "center" driving in a straight line. I darted all over the mile or two of asphalt you gotta drive on to get back to the trailers. Wish I had the money to put a whole new badass steering system in it instead of tracing down problems. Something def has to be done, it's not right at all.