I figured since the thread has been hijacked all to hell all ready...... This is a great read for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. It was posted 11/26/08 on raptoroffroad by dbk (the site owner).
"Well, here's the scoop. This comes from my boy, SVT Chief Nameplate Engineer and former baja race team engineer Jamal Hameedi:
Here is how we ended up in Baja...
As a replacement for the race track durability test we put all SVT products through, we came up with a 62 mile loop in Borrego Springs, CA and ran that loop for about 1300 miles. We ran the Raptor 6.2L M1 prototype through that test, and we will be running our 5.4L "VP" prototype through that test in December. As we reviewed the data and parts during tear down, the Raptor did pretty well through that test. So we thought let's raise the bar a bit and basically run the same test in the Baja 1000. As the decision to go race the Baja 1000 (as part of the engineering development program) was made relatively late - Foutz Motorsports (who was chosen to build the truck because of his success in BITD Full Stock) had about 3 months to build, test, develop and prep this truck. Not to mention develop a logistics plan around 3 different racing teams coming together (Olliges - Team Ford; Randy Merritt - Mongo Racing; Greg Foutz - Foutz Motorsports). And we didn't have alot of production Raptor parts for them to build the truck. And they had to support the media reveal of the production Raptor in Las Vegas at SEMA. So it was an extremely tall hill to climb from the get go. And that's a huge understatement!!! The truck only ran in anger a few days before SEMA (late October)!!!!
So why a Class 8 truck vs. a Full Stock or a Trophy Truck? Given where we were (not in production yet) - we likely were not legal for the Full Stock Class. In fact, due to a shortage of parts, we likely couldn't have even have built a Stock Full truck (keep in mind that this truck is not even through the engineering validation phase let alone in production). Production level suspension arms, bumpers, shocks, bushings, springs and exhaust parts were key items that we had just enough of to support our pre production prove out. Plus - we didn't want to ruffle the feathers of anyone in Stock Full by showing up with a pre production truck. So that meant no Full Stock. I wanted to build a Raptor Trophy Truck. Bad. Real bad. Real real real bad!!! But at the end of the day, campaigning a Trophy Truck is mostly a racing exercise - not a production vehicle validation exercise. You can even turn a grocery getter into a competitive Trophy Truck - and that's not really what we were trying to do. So that left Class 8 where we could fabricate the parts we didn't have available, or substitute off the shelf ones.
It was decided that the truck was to remain mostly stock - much more so than a modern Class 8 truck. Most modern Class 8 trucks don't share suspension pickup points or really anything with the production truck they are based on. They are tube frame Trophy Trucks with remnants of a production frame embedded in them. Which means they have Trophy Truck levels of suspension travel and horsepower - and the Raptor R doesn't even approach that. We kept mostly stock driveline, trans, engine, and body. The rear suspension is leaf sprung (vs. Class 8 4 link coil over rear). The front and rear use production pickup points (vs. Class 8 inboard cage mount A arms/J arms ala Trophy Trucks). There is only 1 Fox Racing shock per corner (vs. coil over and bypass on most Class 8s). So we are a last minute entry, with a last minute truck, with a brand new team, entered in a class that is way above the content on the truck. Are you getting the picture here? We asked for a rear start because "we weren't racing - we were testing"….more on that later.
After contingency on Thursday, we went out to Guadeloupe Wash to aim the light bar and finish all the system checks. The plan was to aim the lights, get back to the hotel, have dinner, do a team meeting to make sure everyone had their pit assignments, and be in bed by 9pm. That was the plan. As you know, Baja loves to chew up plans and spit them out. In the wash, the truck developed a misfire which became gradually worse until the truck would not idle. So the truck is in a deep silt wash, at night, with minimal parts support, and no one has coats on (ie everyone is freezing their asses off!). Dave Dilloway (engine calibrator) tried to debug the engine in the wash, but after lots of ETAS calibration work and many part swaps (the usual suspects - MAF, ETC, processor, etc) - nothing fixed the misfires. Now its about midnight and some locals have befriended us and are watching our debugging action - no doubt being seriously entertained. They even brought us firewood so we could start a fire. We eventually decided to scrap trying to fix the truck in the wash, and focused our attention on getting the truck out of the wash and onto the trailer - without the engine running! Off road trucks aren't exactly pushable out of a deep sand wash...we ended up tow strapping the race truck to a Super Duty. They both got stuck. We ended up tow strapping a production Raptor to the Super Duty which was tow strapped to the race Raptor. Cool picture by the way...the production Raptor saving the day! That did the trick, we loaded up and headed back to the hotel. So at this point in time, the truck isn't running, we haven't had dinner, we haven't had our pit meeting so no one knows where they are going, and we definitely weren't in bed. Other than that, it was all going to plan.
Back at the hotel, Dave, Jim Stevens (engine engineering) and the crew continued debugging the truck through the night. No pit meeting. No dinner. At about 7:00 AM (day of the race!!! - we were set to start around 12:30 pm) Dave decided to swap out the engine harness. At 7:30 - the truck fired and ran fine. We gathered everyone together for an impromptu pit logistics meeting, loaded up the trailer and headed for the start line. Talk about making it at the last minute. The entire crew, drivers, everyone ended up getting 1-2 hours of sleep - some guys pulled an all nighter. Not the way you want to go into a Baja 1000, especially since you know you will be pulling an all nighter the following night racing.
My pit assignment was to chase the truck at Ojos Negros - at about race mile 40 and then go to PFG Pit 5. Which meant we got to see the Trophy Trucks (and their helicopter armada) come through a small portion of cement road in Ojos. Which meant they were pinned at Vmax. Standing 5-10 feet away from a 800+ hp Trophy Truck doing 130+ mph is an unbelievable experience. As an engineer on the Enduro/Ashley/Smith team, I chased Trophy Trucks for almost 10 years, and seeing a Trophy Truck running NEVER got old. Both in sound and in just feeling the sheer force of the air they are moving at that speed. Trophy trucks aren't exactly known for their coefficient of drag. It was interesting to FEEL how the different trucks moved more or less air - and you could gain an insight into their aero efficiency. But I digress...we saw Steve Olliges move through in 4th place (we had requested a rear start in Class 8 since we were there to collect data and finish, not race the other Class 8 vehicles and we started 9th) - so he had already passed some vehicles. As you know, in Baja, "what happened to whom" isn't always available, and you spend the down time while you wait for your race vehicle to show up in the pit theorizing and speculating about who broke what part, who nerfed who off the course, and who blocked the course so no one could get around. And this race was no different. We waited for the Raptor to clear race mile 65, and then headed down to BFG Pit 5 which was on the Pacific Side.
We were getting sporadic updates via sat phone about how the truck was doing. One of the most treacherous parts of the course this year was the Rumarosa Grade - which hadn't been part of the course since 1995 - where you descend 4000 ft in a handful of miles, there are extremely sharp hairpins, and 100-200 foot sheer drop offs on a trail that is barely wide enough to hold a production vehicle - let alone a Trophy Truck - or even the widened Raptor. And if someone breaks, they will shut the entire race down because there is no room to get around them. So everyone breathed a sigh of relief when we got word that Steve had made it through just fine. The next reports we got were that Bud Brutsman was in the vehicle and they made a precautionary change to the driveshaft because there was some vibration. Then we got a report that a skidplate bracket had broken and we needed to repair that. Then we got a report that the truck was running hot but that turned out to be that the fans had gotten shut off inadvertently. Gene Martindale was now in the driver's seat. Gene is the SVT lead vehicle dynamics engineer on the Raptor - but this was his first off-road race. Lemans in a Viper ACR (check). Developing the Ford GT (check). Mustang Challenge and ALMS racing (check). Now he was adding the Baja 1000 to that list (check!). And he made SVT proud. Keep in mind that all the drivers were told to take it easy to insure a finish. Gene was the question mark for me as he is a racer through and through and he can pretty much scare anyone in anything as long as it has 4 wheels on it - maybe even 3. But he stuck to the plan, and handed the truck off to the next driver, Greg Foutz unharmed. We think we may have been up to 1st or 2nd in Class 8 during the Gulf side of the race.
The truck was scheduled to arrive in Pit 5 (around race mile 500) around 3:30 AM. We got there around 5 pm and set up pit with the BFG guys. And waited. And told stories. And laughed. And ripped on everyone else on the team that wasn't in our chase crew. Even those that where present. All in good fun. Just generally had a really fun time watching all the motos, quads, and trucks go through. We were hearing reports about leaf spring issues but not much more detail than that. Then we heard they were pretty serious. We had broken 1 leaf spring eyelet and fractured the other. The Raptor was down for hours while they repaired what they could with what they had. We had one more leaf spring that we would need to repair as well. The truck finally came in at around 6 or 7 AM and we started replacing the driver side rear leaf. As we were wrenching, the second place Class 8 came through the PFG Pit and left about 30 minutes ahead of us.
A funny side story at this point. About 15-20 minutes after the race truck showed up at Pit 5, Buck (part of the Gulf side chase crew showed up) - following the race truck on the race course in his prerunner. Curt and Aion from JWT (they were there to film the making of the Raptor documentary) rode along so they could follow the truck and keep filming it. Buck is a hard core desert chase crew guy. When you tell him to follow the race vehicle to the next pit in case it needs assistance - that's what he does. Curt got out of the prerunner and labeled Buck as officially crazy. "He is wired differently than any of us! I could make a film about him alone!". Buck had dropped the throttle in the prerunner to keep up with the race truck. The final tally was 1 race truck passed the prerunner, and he passed 2 motorcycles and 2 trucks. But those were racing vehicles!
Randy Merritt hopped in the truck and he was going to drive it to the finish. We made sure we reminded Randy that the goal was to FINISH - but there was the second place truck only 30 minutes ahead of us, and we had about 130 miles to close the gap. I think Cliff Irey said it best, "we came down to Baja to test the Raptor, and a race broke out...". That pretty much sums it up...
Randy was able to close the gap to second place - on some accounts down to about 5-10 minutes. And then a vehicle rolled about 50 miles from the finish, and stopped the field. SCORE shut everyone down until the vehicle was taken care of. The second place truck (not sure if it was the actual vehicle that rolled - some were saying it was...) wasn't stopped with us - they were clear and running to the finish. So that pretty much decided the finishing order. We pulled into the finish line with a time of around 25.5 hours - 30 minutes behind 2nd place. So there it was. Everyone on Team Raptor was ecstatic - it's very rare for an off-road racing truck to finish its first race. It's ever rarer for an off-road racing truck to finish it's first race which happens to be a Baja 1000. And we finished. And we finished 3rd in class. In an essentially stock full Raptor racing in Class 8. Which had a rear start. Which wasn't running 5 hours before the start time. Not too shabby - and everyone on the team knew it. We were all so proud of the drivers, the co drivers, the chase crew, and most importantly, the Raptor R race truck. Greg Foutz and Cliff Irey pulled a rabbit out of their hats by getting this race done. If ever there was a demonstration that this is a team sport - this project and race demonstrated it. We think this is the first time a factory OEM truck has ever competed in the Baja 1000 during its development phase and prior to production. I asked Sal if he knew another instance where that had happened and he couldn't remember one. Which I think is pretty cool.
As mentioned earlier, we had a full production Raptor at the event. We took it to the Horsepower Ranch on Wednesday night, to contingency on Thursday, and used it for chasing the race. It's interesting to see the reaction from people when they see the truck. Some think it’s a concept vehicle. Some think its one-off aftermarket F150. But after you take them through all the content in the suspension, powertrain, driveline, body, and all the electronic systems we've changed to allow it to excel in the desert, just about everyone wants one! And they think its really cool that the sport and lifestyle of desert racing has spawned a production vehicle - with real content - not just in name. What I'm really excited about is how this truck is going to expose the rest of the country to what everyone in the Southwest already knows: prerunners are some of the coolest trucks around. It was surreal to bring the production Raptor back to Baja where the idea for the truck was born."
