Braaaaptor
Starbucks Enthusiast
Long story long: moving to northern CA is surprisingly B U L L S H I T. Virtually everywhere you go or think of going for some dirt therapy is fenced, owned, and unwelcoming. Without places to take the Rap I was starting to get disheartened with the truck. Damn near $7 a gallon for premium was also not helping. I was driving the truck 1-2 times a month....
Trying to think outside the box and reinvigorate my love for the truck I started looking into rallycross. I searched around and found @Big Blue and others had a good time with the Rap and figured I'd give it a shot. Now the tricky thing is SCCA rules actually ban trucks for being 'high center of gravity' vehicles and they're worried about people flipping it. On their forums they actually explicitly ban Raptors. I turned on my @John M charm and @smurfslayer wits and sent a nice and polite email explaining that I'm experienced offroading my Raptor (hopped a curb at Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Dutch Bros, and Krispy Kreme) and guess what... they let me in!
With that in place, I still needed to figure out the gas situation... enter the wizard himself @GooseTuned with an E50 tune. Shhh the commies in Sacramento don't want you to know this one simple trick but the Raptor will happily run ethanol. And it's $3.89/gal. And it's a bio fuel. So I'm saving the planet Greta?
Okay, so now I have more power, cheaper fuel (lol @ my fuel economy), and a place to have fun. Here's the results:
I had an absolute blast running around with a bunch of subies. The rallycross crew is a motley one at best and run such an eclectic group of vehicles including a Porsche Cayenne, Subaru Forrester (soccer mom edition), a Toyota pickup straight out of Afghanistan, and a 1987 Chevy Sprint Turbo. Everyone was extremely welcoming, friendly, and helpful explaining everything to a newcomer. I became known as 'Raptor Guy' and everyone passing by had something funny to say or was genuinely interested in the truck.
Performance wise... not bad! The track was extremely narrow in places which made the Rap a handful but setting up for straights and knowing you have a small thermonuclear device under the right pedal made quick work of the sections in between cones. I think I got 8/11 in my run group of modified AWD cars and I was only about 10 seconds off of 4th place over 6 total runs. Surprisingly I only hit a few cones throughout my runs and as you can tell from the last photo, when they wetted the track it became extremely muddy and barely driveable.
Capping things off nicely, I won a raffle at the end of the day for some EBC brakes and rotors.
This is definitely my new thing, next RX is in two weeks and another one in August. More to come!
Trying to think outside the box and reinvigorate my love for the truck I started looking into rallycross. I searched around and found @Big Blue and others had a good time with the Rap and figured I'd give it a shot. Now the tricky thing is SCCA rules actually ban trucks for being 'high center of gravity' vehicles and they're worried about people flipping it. On their forums they actually explicitly ban Raptors. I turned on my @John M charm and @smurfslayer wits and sent a nice and polite email explaining that I'm experienced offroading my Raptor (hopped a curb at Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Dutch Bros, and Krispy Kreme) and guess what... they let me in!
With that in place, I still needed to figure out the gas situation... enter the wizard himself @GooseTuned with an E50 tune. Shhh the commies in Sacramento don't want you to know this one simple trick but the Raptor will happily run ethanol. And it's $3.89/gal. And it's a bio fuel. So I'm saving the planet Greta?
Okay, so now I have more power, cheaper fuel (lol @ my fuel economy), and a place to have fun. Here's the results:
I had an absolute blast running around with a bunch of subies. The rallycross crew is a motley one at best and run such an eclectic group of vehicles including a Porsche Cayenne, Subaru Forrester (soccer mom edition), a Toyota pickup straight out of Afghanistan, and a 1987 Chevy Sprint Turbo. Everyone was extremely welcoming, friendly, and helpful explaining everything to a newcomer. I became known as 'Raptor Guy' and everyone passing by had something funny to say or was genuinely interested in the truck.
Performance wise... not bad! The track was extremely narrow in places which made the Rap a handful but setting up for straights and knowing you have a small thermonuclear device under the right pedal made quick work of the sections in between cones. I think I got 8/11 in my run group of modified AWD cars and I was only about 10 seconds off of 4th place over 6 total runs. Surprisingly I only hit a few cones throughout my runs and as you can tell from the last photo, when they wetted the track it became extremely muddy and barely driveable.
Capping things off nicely, I won a raffle at the end of the day for some EBC brakes and rotors.
This is definitely my new thing, next RX is in two weeks and another one in August. More to come!
