Inside Ford’s Attempt to Conquer Dakar with “The Ultimate Raptor”

Somewhere in the middle of the Arabian desert, the scream of a high-strung Coyote V-8 is echoing off the arid expanse. It’s a familiar 5.0-liter from Ford, but it’s tucked down deep inside a machine unlike anything that has worn a blue oval before. It’s the Raptor T1+, a car purpose-built to enter the 2025 running of the world’s greatest off-road race: The Dakar Rally.

Since 1979, the Dakar has tested all manner of two- and four-wheel machines to the brink of their capabilities. The desert rally also challenges the mettle of drivers and the crews that keep everything operational through two full weeks of battling some of the most punishing terrain on the planet.

Dakar is a marathon unlike any other, and one of its star machines this year is a Raptor meant to embody everything the brand represents. Its design was influenced by lessons learned from Ford’s rallying heritage, run in anger by a team of engineers and mechanics who’ve been making Fords go fast in all conditions for decades.

The goal: be the first factory manufacturer to win Dakar with a new car in its first attempt while figuring out how to make better road-going Raptors along the way.

Intro to Dakar

It all started in 1979 as the Paris Dakar Rally, an event that saw brawny off-road machines lining up on the chic streets of Paris before racing their way into the heart of Africa. In those days, the event was utterly brutal—mostly independent racers running with little support and too many finding themselves stranded on the dunes for days when mechanical maladies struck. 

As the event’s popularity grew, so did the support. Better facilities helped racers recoup between stages. More manufacturers brought bigger budgets and bigger speed. Safety improvements and emergency trackers meant help was closer at hand.

Sadly, no amount of technology or development could keep the event ahead of geopolitical realities. Security concerns became common as the machines screamed south across the sands, coming to a head in 2008 when threats in Mauritania resulted in the event’s cancellation.

Like the competitors, the race organizers were undeterred. They simply set up shop on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. From 2009 to 2019, the race ran in South America, but in 2020, the lure of the Arabian Desert (and the wealth of its oil reserves) called the event back across the Atlantic. Saudi Arabia has been the home of this great race ever since.

Despite the changes and improvements, the challenge is much the same. The Dakar Rally consists of 13 stages run over two weeks, with only one day of rest built into the schedule, giving drivers and mechanics scant chance to catch up on sleep.

For the 2025 running, Dakar entrants face nearly 5000 miles of rock, sand, silt, mud, and everything in between. Tires will puncture, suspensions will shatter, and wills will break. It’s two weeks of hell, which Ford figured would be a pretty good time not only to show off what a Raptor can be but also to learn how to make its next generation of road-going machines even more radical.

Project Origins

Ford’s journey into the gritty, wind-swept barrens of Saudi Arabia began somewhere rather more posh: the 2022 Goodwood Festival of Speed. Ford Performance boss Mark Rushbrook, Ford CEO Jim Farley, and other top Blue Oval execs gathered to discuss the company’s future motorsports efforts. 

Eventually, the topic shifted to the dirt. After discussing some of the greatest off-road events of the Americas, like the Baja 1000 and King of the Hammers, Farley asked about something more substantial: “What’s it gonna take to have a Dakar program?” 

Rushbrook didn’t need much convincing. “That was in July of 2022,” he said. “And by late August, we had an approved program.”

The speed with which that check cleared can be attributed to the success of Ford’s growing cadre of lifted, angry Raptor-branded machines. “We had no idea when we did the F-150 Raptor. We had no idea how successful it would be,” Rushbrook said. “It was just an idea for one truck, go do it, and it was massively successful.” 

That first F-150 led to beefier flavors of the Ranger and Bronco, plus special editions like the 720-horsepower F-150 Raptor R and the race-ready Bronco DR. Raptor has evolved from an options package to a covetable brand within a brand. Covetable, and lucrative. 

“Raptor right now is a very profitable brand for us,” Rushbrook said. 

But to keep Raptor fans engaged, you need to keep raising the performance bar and prove to customers that all this isn’t just for show. The best way to do both is to go racing, and Ford has certainly done that, including winning the Heavy Metal Limited class at the grueling Baja 1000 in 2024.

But Dakar is a much bigger challenge. With buy-in from Farley, Rushbrook and team started looking at the particulars. Much like Le Mans, it takes years of preparation and testing to have a chance of winning the Dakar. It also helps to have some good partners. For Ford, that partner is M-Sport.

Founded by Malcolm Wilson in 1979, M-Sport has been Ford’s rally enabler for more than 25 years. Ford and M-Sport have competed in the World Rally Championship together since the ’90s, covering the decades between the Escort and the Puma, with the Focus and Fiesta in between. M-Sport has won the WRC manufacturer’s championship with Ford three times and the driver’s championship twice.

This, though, is a radically different challenge. “The whole WRC championship is less kilometers than Dakar. The whole season. That, in itself, tells you you have to have a different sort of mindset,” Wilson said.

Executing that mindset is Matthew Wilson, Malcolm’s son and a former WRC driver himself. He’s team principal for Ford and M-Sport’s Dakar campaign, overseeing everything from race strategy and execution to crew accommodations in the wind-swept pit area, a sprawling bivouac that shifts location every few days.

Despite the obvious differences, the younger Wilson says it’s not uncharted territory. “We’ve got good pedigree from [rally]. It’s certain things that you know, the stress points, suspension stuff, that type of thing,” Matthew Wilson said. “You’re working to a different set of regulations, but you’re covering some of the same type of terrain.”

With each WRC event running over a long weekend in a contained space, logistical challenges are relatively few. Dakar’s length and location mean taking care of the crew is a challenge in and of itself. “You’re living together for three weeks. You’ve got to look after them. So we’ve tried to do as much as we can,” Matthew Wilson said. “You’ll notice that they’re all in tents on top of vehicles rather than tents on the ground. It’s all small things, but after two or three weeks, they’re making a difference.”

To learn all those small things, M-Sport made a tentative first step last year, running some Ranger Raptors prepped by South African-builder Neil Woolridge Motorsport. “We were able to come here last year with a vehicle from South Africa, which, to be honest, was invaluable,” Matthew Wilson said. 

That, though, was just a brief incursion ahead of this year’s full-on assault.

“The Ultimate Raptor”

Mark Rushbrook said that Ford’s Dakar aspirations are meant to answer one question: “If you have a free form, what would the ultimate Raptor be? That’s what this is.”

The result is the Raptor T1+, and at its heart is a familiar thing to any Ford fan: A 5.0-liter V-8. It’s the Coyote, the same block found in the Mustang, where it makes 500 horsepower in Dark Horse trim. In the T1+, it makes just 360.

Why so little? It all comes down to regulations. This year, the FIA, the international governing body that oversees motorsport, including the Dakar Rally, introduced new regulations designed to level the playing field. As has been applied in FIA-sanctioned endurance racing, all competitors in the top T1 category of this year’s event run a torque meter on the rear axle of their cars, which measures output in real time, and it’s up to the teams to ensure they don’t go too high. If all goes according to plan, regardless of how their cars are driven, they’ll all make exactly the same power. 

“We are running a system from the FIA that assures that everybody is having the same power,” said Carlos Sainz, winner of the 2024 Dakar Rally and a key part of Ford’s offensive this year. “The engine can deliver much more power than what we are using.”

The priority then shifts to simplicity and reliability. With much of the competition running smaller-displacement turbocharged engines, Ford thinks it has an advantage. 

“It’s a very reliable engine, and simplicity means a lot in an endurance event like this,” Rushbrook said. There are other advantages, too. 

“The noise is great,” Sainz said.

However, there are some disadvantages, including power output at altitude. But, given the nature of the terrain in Saudi Arabia, that shouldn’t be a concern. Efficiency, though, is a major factor, and that’s not an area where big V-8s are typically renowned.

“Efficiency is definitely key, because the less fuel we can carry, the better it is,” Matthew Wilson said. The tank of the T1+ is 500 liters, or 132 gallons, adding almost 800 pounds of weight to this 4400-pound racer.

Though the engine block is familiar, everything else is bespoke, including a dry-sump lubrication system and acres of radiators to keep the thing cool in the Arabian sun. The Raptor T1+ features a cramped cockpit that seats two: Driver, of course, and co-driver, whose job it is to decipher the cryptic route notes handed out by organizers and keep the machine on course at speed. 

While the car is riddled with technologies, GPS is expressly not allowed. Finding the right way is a human challenge.

Another parallel with Ford’s road-going Raptors is suspension from Fox. 

“So Bobby [Smith], who’s here for Fox, he participates in our tuning and development for road Raptors and here in racing as well,” Rushbrook said.

Despite being a household name in American racing, Fox is a virtual unknown at Dakar. This was a cause for concern. “I’ll be totally open that we had our reservations. It’s never really been on a Dakar vehicle before,” Rushbrook said. “I have to say, it’s been a really, really good relationship and a very pleasant surprise for us.”

Finally, the Raptor T1+ rolls on 37-inch BF Goodrich tires, the same size as those on the F-150 Raptor R.

These parallels, engine and suspension and tires, are, of course, important for marketing, but Ford Performance boss Mark Rushbrook is adamant that this is more than a public relations exercise.

“One of our pillars is winning races and championships that matter. Another pillar is real, two-way tech transfer,” he said. “It’s part of the mission.”

In fact, Ford recently restructured Rushbrook’s role to double down on that concept. He now oversees not only the company’s racing efforts but also its road-going Ford Performance machines.

Executing

With years of preparation and engineering now coming to fruition, it’s time to execute. Winning is the goal, and the entire team sees reliability as the only way to succeed. 

“We’ve always had this mantra from the beginning that an airplane can’t fall out of the sky,” Matthew Wilson said “So, there’s always a lot of backups.”

It’s a level beyond anything driver Mitch Guthrie Jr. has previously experienced. “There’s redundant systems where, in the electrical, like, if this panel of buttons goes bad, you can press this button, and it makes these other buttons work as those buttons,” he said. “Even the tool bags, all the little things, everything’s prepared perfectly.”

Ford took redundancy to an entirely new level by bringing a whopping four trucks to the event this year. Most teams field two or three.

Those four include a veritable dream team of pilots. Guthrie Jr. is the lone American of the four, also the youngest of Ford’s crop, but an experienced racer who won three stages on his Dakar debut in 2020. Last year, he was 25 minutes clear of the competition before a mechanical issue on the final stage saw him slip to second.

His teammate is 28-time Dakar entrant Nani Roma, one of only three competitors who have won Dakar on both two wheels and four.

Mattias Ekström has run Dakar four times, his most recent runs as part of Audi’s big-budget offensive that started in 2022. Last year, Ekström was called upon to pull over and give up his tires to teammate Carlos Sainz, who had punctured. Sainz would take the overall victory on what would prove to be Audi’s final year.

Sainz, too, found a new home with Ford this year, rounding out the driver lineup and providing another connection with Ford’s roots in rally racing.

“He was my first driver when I took on the Ford contract in ’97, and he hasn’t changed,” Malcolm Wilson said. “He’s just an incredible human being. He’s 62! The passion, the determination, the attention to detail, the way he motivates everybody to get everybody working around him.”

“He had a very, very good relationship with the whole team,” Matthew Wilson said. “I think when he came back to the first test and there were probably four or five faces that are still here from that period . . . I think it was a feeling of coming home.”

Sainz won the Spanish Rally Championship in a Ford Sierra RS Cosworth twice before switching to Toyota in the World Rally Championship. He won that driver’s title twice in the early 1990s before switching to Ford and M-Sport. Now, he’s coming back to Ford after winning Dakar with Audi. 

“At this stage of my career, I know what car I want. I’m happy with what we’ve got and how we got it,” Sainz said.

These heavy hitters give Ford and M-Sport four weapons to play with, and that leads us to perhaps the biggest difference between Ford’s roots in WRC and what the team will need to do to succeed here. In many ways, Dakar is all about sacrifice. 

“If you look at anybody that’s won Dakar in probably forever, at some point, they’ve had a teammate help them. The best example of that is last year, Mattias helping Carlos. So, I think the plan is everybody starts on an equal footing, and we let the race play out,” Matthew Wilson said. “There is no doubt at some point they might end up with three cars helping one car, or it might be one car helping three cars.”

In the past, teams have assigned different strategies to different cars. Some drivers were told to run the cars hard, so-called “rabbits” to lure competitors into breaking, while their teammates took more conservative approaches. Today, it’s almost all rabbits.

“This sport is becoming more of a sprint,” Ekström said. “Everybody goes flat out from the beginning.”

The only thing left to do now is to run the rest of the race. Ford showed good early speed in testing but had some teething problems at a precursor race in Morocco. The team will be hoping those issues are behind them in Saudi Arabia, as everyone is gunning for overall victory.

Rushbrook wants Ford to become the first manufacturer to win with a new vehicle, but that’s not the only goal. 

“What Audi did was interesting in the way they did it. They were very focused. They wanted to come and win and check that box,” he said. “We want to be here for the long term, not just to come here and get a win and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got our win. We’re done’.”

For now, the focus is much closer. “I don’t look too far ahead,” Ekström said. “If you go day-by-day, you plan for the next day and the half-day after you keep in mind, but it’s not that we are thinking so far ahead, because so much can happen.”

It’s taken a massive effort to get here since that initial meeting of Ford execs at Goodwood in 2022. But it’ll take more than effort to get that win. 

Most Dakar victors have relied on more than a little luck, and Sainz unfortunately has already suffered some of the bad kind. On stage two of the rally, he rolled his Raptor T1+ on a dune, leaving a good chunk of the machine’s bodywork laying in the sand. The incident led to his retirement from the race. The remaining Raptors, however, are still mixing it up and making the desert echo with that Coyote scream.

The Dakar Rally kicked off on January 3 and runs through the 17th.