Thank you for posting and hosting this vid. I enjoyed it immensely and glad someone took the time to make a full length feature on running a Raptor in Baja. I remember the race that year well as we were running a solo bike (Ironman) and I’d set up a pit near BFG. Embarrassingly I remember thinking ‘oh looks like they’ve replace the Lobo (Mexican Ford F-150) with this new truck named the Raptor… can’t wait till they bring it to the states’ … HAAA (I had been up for about 36 hours at that time).
IMO the Raptor R they took to Baja was about as close to stock as you’d want down there. The modifications that were made were fairly minor in comparison to a full spec race truck and under any circumstance you’d want the vehicles suspension maximized to the class regulations.
Would a showroom stock Raptor be able to complete in the B1K and make the time limit? … IMO… NO. The race organizers base the time limit on an approximate 25mph average and although this may not seem fast trying to maintain the average puts a very severe pounding on the vehicle.
Last year I took my new (2 mo.) Raptor to the B1K to chase and did a little over 200 miles on the course (2100 miles total) … of which I towed our car about 25 miles. My impression of the Raptor compared to all the other chase trucks I’ve been in… incredible. I had more fun than you can imagine chasing through the rocks and silt with the truck nary missing a beat. But it was at chase pace and not race pace… there is a big difference. Everyone on the race team wanted to ride in the Raptor because it was so comfy and so much fun.
This year we’ll be prerunning and chasing so if you want to check out your Raptor south of the border on the course come on down… some of the most fun you can have down there is prerunning. I’ll post something up as it gets closer to race day.
BTW the Raptor is by far the favorite truck down there as I saw many last year. One team had 4 Raptors set up just for chase.
/ron