Finke a proving ground for Ford Ranger

Ford has chosen to tackle this week’s Tatts Finke Desert Race as a proving ground for its Ranger Raptor.

The Blue Oval will compete in Australia’s blue riband offroad event in partnership with Walkinshaw Performance, with the same vehicle which raced in last year’s Baja 1000 in Mexico.

There was already a heavy Australian influence in the Raptor, with Ford’s Melbourne-based design team developed the vehicle for the road and Kelly Racing building one for competition, and the lure of Finke was too good to ignore.

“That’s another proving ground,” Ford Performance Motorsports Global Director Mark Rushbrook told selected media including Speedcafe.

“We are a global company, especially with where the product was developed.

“It’s an opportunity for us to race it in another important part of the world for us, in the Australian market, and another tough proving ground to show what the product is capable of.”

On the initial rollout at Baja, Rushbrook explained, “Part of it was timing.

“We were ready to go racing in November of last year and, with a global introduction of the next-gen Ranger and the next-gen Ranger Raptor, that was the first opportunity that we had we felt the most appropriate.

“So, we were able to make it a global effort – with Ford Australia, with Kelly Racing – to build the vehicle, send it over, do more testing in the United States and in Mexico, and then go compete there.

“All along we had planned that we would be going to Finke this year, following that effort at Baja last year, so it was all about timing.”

While the Finke Desert Race is a relatively short – compared to the Baja 1000 – 226km each way, plus prologue, vehicles are subject to harsh conditions, including the track’s famous ‘whoops’.

The Raptor, which will be driven in the Production 4WD class by the same father-and-son duo of renowned off-roaders Brad and Byam Lovell who were part of the Baja crew, has been specially tuned for its race in the Northern Territory.

“Yeah, absolutely,” said Rushbrook on whether set-up had changed since its debut in Mexico.

“Working with the partners, we were able to tune that as we would to go to a different race track or, in this case, a different offroad course, different terrain.”

The Method Race Wheels Prologue takes place today in Alice Springs, with Cars underway at 08:00 local time/08:30 AEST and Bikes in the afternoon, before the outbound leg down to Aputula (Finke) tomorrow.