Last June, the Ford Ranger Raptor racer received some upgrades ahead of the 2024 Tatts Finke Desert Race in Australia, which included a new suspension calibration for the truck’s dampers, along with some weight reduction. Those changes paid off big time as the Ranger Raptor secured its second straight win in the Production 4WD class and was the only vehicle in that same class to finish both legs of the race. Now, the road-going version of the Ford Ranger Raptor is slated to receive some suspension updates, too.
According to Australia’s Carsales, FoMoCo’s success at the Tatts Finke Desert Race has given it some ideas in regard to tweaking the Fox shocks already present in the production Ford Ranger Raptor. “One thing Ford Performance always do is they never stand still,” said Justin Capicchiano, Ford Performance, SVE program manager. “There’s always evolution, you’re always trying to move the product forward. We learnt a lot about the capacity of the live valve system. That race car has proven it’s got a much bigger tuning window than probably what we thought when we started the program and that’s potentially some opportunity in future.”
“The temperatures that we were seeing in race were 100 degrees [Celcius] more than we saw in our testing for the road car and we’re still durable at that higher temperature limit,” Capicchiano added. “We’ve seen what we can actually do in a race environment. The benefit of that [Fox] system is how the dampers are built up, the hardware, the shim packs, the orifices we use and how many we use.”
In addition to this little revelation, Capicchiano also touched on what the future holds for the Ford Ranger Raptor in terms of potential powertrain upgrades, too. He noted that a hybrid remains unlikely for the foreseeable future, which is also the case with a more potent Ranger Raptor R, however, as The Blue Oval seems content to stick with the the twin-turbocharged 3.0L V6 EcoBoost engine for now.
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