How Ford's racing success shapes the Ranger Raptor bakkie

You may have noticed that Ford is back in almost all forms of motorsport in an aggressive way and it’s more than just having a presence.

They're involved in both track and off-road racing ranging from Nascar, Mustang Challenge, Mustang Cup, Le Mans, WRC, Formula 1 from next year, and also in the Dakar rally.

For us as South Africans, we have a special affinity with the Dakar and using the data collected from the locally built Neil Woolridge Ranger T1+ in the 2024 event, Ford Performance built the Raptor T1+ to take part in the world’s most gruelling off-road race this year, where they finished third and fifth.

Why do we race, asked Justin Capicchiano, Ford Performance and Special Vehicle Programmes Manager at a Raptor drive event in Dubai.

As part of a Ford International Markets Group (IMG) gathering we got to drive the F150 Raptor, Bronco Raptor and Ranger Raptor over various terrains.

In the global Ford group, IMG is responsible for Australia, New Zealand, ASEAN, North Africa, South Africa and Middle East markets.

“People ask what we are trying to prove when we sell thousands of Ranger Raptors every year. It’s not necessarily about what we are trying to prove. We go to races to win them.

“But we also go to learn, that’s one of the cornerstones of Mark Rushbrook’s point of view on racing.”

Rushbrook is the Global Director of Ford Performance.

 “We race production class in the Ranger Raptor, Bronco Raptor and F150 Raptor and that’s the biggest tangible benefit back to the customer of any kind of motorsport in the off-road scene.

“In Baha version one it was essentially a standard Ranger Raptor. We didn’t do much to the suspension, we put a roll cage in, shielded up the underside, went racing and won our class.

“From there we evolved the vehicle.”

They looked at things like cooling and damping to see how far they could explore the platform and capability so that they could feed that back to the base vehicle.

“We spent a lot of time doing a bespoke damper tune and up until we had a small failure, we were 25 minutes up in the first hour over the previous year.

“Because of the breakage we had to slow down and nurse it home because we effectively had no rear suspension, yet we still managed to be only five minutes slower than the previous year.”

And that’s where racing feeds back to the cars we drive.

“We learnt about the capacity the damping system has and where the failure points were that allows us to engineer the next version of the vehicle to have a damper system with increased capabilities and increased ride performance.

“But crucially we now know where the window is so we’re working with a broader, wider window and that’s important when you’re talking about never standing still so we keep evolving the vehicle and moving it forward.

But back to the Dakar.

“Obviously the goal for Ford Performance is to win but it’s also about learning.”

The Ranger Raptor T1+ uses fox shocks (as all Raptor products do) but they aren’t live valves because the race doesn’t allow it.

“They do allow us a whole lot of learning road loads, damper stroke and heating and being able to keep them cool over a long and arduous stage,” he said.

“That’s why we race off-road.  We want to dominate. Our performance in production racing is unsurpassed.  No-one has our level of success in off-road racing in production.

“It’s something we’re immensely proud of,” he concluded.

IOL