The Dakar Rally, one of the toughest and most respected off-road races in the world, covers a distance greater than the total combined mileage of an F1 season in just two weeks. Over some of the most unforgiving desert terrain in the world, the Dakar attracts tenacious, dogged competitors who push their vehicles (and themselves) to the max.
For the 2025 rally, Ford entered the T1+ category with purpose-built Raptors piloted by a collection of fierce competitors. The team included notable names like Carlos Sainz, Sr., a four-time Dakar champion; rallycross expert Mattias Ekström; King of the Hammers star Mitch Guthrie Jr.; and Nani Roma, a two-time Dakar champion in both motorcycle and car categories.
The 47th edition of the Dakar kicked off with the Prologue Stage on Friday, January 3, and finished on Friday, January 17. Together, the Ford teams piloted vehicles equipped with 5.0-liter V8 engines that weren’t quite stock, but started out as the same V8 that’s available in a new F-150.
Built for “unrelenting misery”
Launched in 1979 with a grueling route between Paris, France and Dakar, Senegal, the Dakar Rally required teams to cross through Algeria, Niger, Mali, and Upper Volta on their way into the heart of western Africa. As geopolitical winds shifted, the rally moved from Europe and Africa to South America and resumed in 2020 across Saudi Arabia.
Wind whips through the region on a daily basis, filling every crevice with sand as it emancipates itself from a massive carpet of dunes. Based on what I know about competing across 2,000 miles in eight days for the Rebelle Rally, driving 5,000 miles in 14 days for the Dakar sounds like a feat for superhumans.
“It’s two weeks of unrelenting misery, to be honest,” says Jay Ward, the director of global Ford Performance communications. He’s only half joking.
To conquer that kind of terrain, Ford’s team created the Raptor T1+ with extreme toughness in mind. However, Ward says, the Dakar vehicles include very specific attributes from Ford’s mass-production Raptor trucks. Take a look at the front grille and kick plates, and you’ll recognize elements from the Raptor line. It’s as if Ford took an F-150 and injected it with some kind of potion that beefed it up and gave it superhero powers.
“We’ve tried to bring some of the attributes of [our mass production vehicles] into the Raptor T1+, but ultimately what it has to do is extraordinary,” Ward says. “As good as our street cars are, not even they could take this on.”
To power the rally vehicles, the Ford team looked at all of the engines across its entire portfolio, including the hybrid setups. Ultimately, Ward says it came down to needing a powerplant that would be ultra-reliable and tested in the toughest environments. Ford’s modular Coyote V8 engine–the same one that powers the 500-hp Mustang Dark Horse–rose to the top as the clear choice.
“I wouldn’t say the entire program was built around the [Coyote V8] engine, but it became very obvious very quickly we could start building the vehicle around it,” Ward says.
Magic carpet seats and dampers
Once the engine was selected, the rest of the Raptor T1+ fell into place. A tubular chassis forms the base; Ward explains that a standard chassis brings inherent compromises to the table. If you’re going to win, you need to start from scratch with a modular tube frame, he says.
The shocks play an important role in this truck, as the challenging course necessitates a huge amount of suspension travel. Ford chose Fox shocks, which are also used in its F-150 pickups. The Raptor T1+, however, has two shocks at each corner that can take on anything that the Dakar Rally would throw at it, says director of product communications Mike Levine.
Body panels were crafted from carbon fiber for its lightweight properties, and that meant if any part was damaged during testing, it had to be tossed and another piece installed. Carbon fiber is expensive, which contributes to the total cost of each build; a conservative estimate for each truck of this caliber might approach the $1 million mark.
Seats are also critical, as the drivers and co-drivers are sitting in the cabin for at least eight hours per day for two weeks straight. As tempting as it might have been to use a lightweight sport racing seat in the Raptor T1+, the build team knew the competitors would be very uncomfortable within a half hour. In fact, Ward had the unique opportunity to ride along with Sainz, Sr on a test run in Morocco to see exactly how well the seats turned out.
“[Carlos Sainz] launched this thing into the future, and as we came towards a gully I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be by far the biggest accident of my life. If I survive it, I’ll be a lucky man.’ And we hit this thing and honestly, it was like being on a bloody magic carpet. The thing just floated straight over the top of it.” At the end of the Dakar Rally, the Ford Raptor T1+ notched a third-place podium finish in the Ultimate category in its debut year. The Blue Oval will take what it learned and come back next year with new enhancements. Even more importantly, the data Ford gathers from this custom Raptor T1+ will be applied to its passenger cars and trucks, making them better in the long run as well.
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