Bred for Baja: Ford unveils the new SVT Raptor
SVT is not a name common to the offroad racing word. Heck, it’s a name we thought was being killed off altogether a few years back, so the last thing anyone was expecting them to be working on was a truck designed to drive the kind of racetracks that shake even purpose-built vehicles to bits.
Regardless, the engineering team at SVT decided that they just weren’t interested in building another Lightning, so they teamed up with the suspension experts at Fox Racing to develop a truck capable of taking on grueling off-road courses like the Baja 1000.
This truck will even put the cars and trucks from Ford Australia’s FPV division to shame.
AMERICA, F@#K YEAH!
This isn’t your dad’s F150. It’s wider, it’s taller, and it’s tougher - but the real difference lies in the bespoke suspension. The SVT team took the vanilla F150’s front suspension and promptly chucked it in a dumpster somewhere. They then designed custom long-travel suspension so the Raptor can ride over bumps that would leave conventional suspension designs on the jounce bumpers. The front suspension has a total travel of 11.2 inches, a marked improvement over the stock figure of 8.5 inches. The rear suspension retains the 13.5 inches of travel the normal F150 already has.
Look closely, this is the last time a Raptor will be seen this clean.
Not content to give the big truck mere suspension travel, Fox Racing designed a set of internal-bypass shocks especially for use in the Raptor. The shocks, while designed for racing and perform as such, also had to pass Ford’s 10-years-or-150,000-miles criteria to be used in the warranty-backed truck.
A bevy of other improvements using tougher bits from the Super Duty series and even the Mexican version of the F150 mean the Raptor is more than strong enough to handle the prerunning duty it was designed for. Designing a truck to take hard impacts at highway speeds is easier said than done, and SVT had to come up with a new design process entirely for the Raptor’s creation. The design team laser-mapped an entire 62-mile offroad course created specifically to subject the Raptor to the kinds of conditions it would face. Every bump, rut, rock and jump was logged and mapped into a virtual representation of the track. Every time the Raptor prototypes ran the course, new data was collected and worked into the design until SVT had a complete picture of the stresses the Raptor would undergo, so they could design components that would withstand them. It’s one tough truck.
Heave-ho will initially come from the standard 5.4L V8, but by the end of 2009 the new 6.2L BOSS V8 will be available in the Raptor with ~400HP and over 400ft-lbs of torque, more than enough for trail duty. A third engine is rumored for 2011, but Ford is keeping it tightly under wraps.
The bottom line? Expect to see some cool Raptor videos and questionable warranty claims.
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