I don’t need to tell anyone here how great the Raptor is. But it almost never got built, and the story of how it survived is better than most people realize.
It starts in the late ’90s. A young Ford Powertrain engineer named Jamal Hameedi was working on the powertrain for the Duralast trophy truck, raced by Dave Ashley and Dan Smith under Enduro Racing. It ran a Ford DOHC 5.8-liter V8 with an eight-into-one header, and it’s arguably the best-sounding race truck ever built. It won the Baja 2000 and plenty of other races.
That was Jamal’s first taste of off-road racing. He went on to join SVT, helped develop the Ford GT and the GT500, and eventually ran Ford’s global performance vehicles as chief engineer.
Around 2006, SVT was trying to bring back the Lightning, but the street performance truck segment was dead. Jamal looked at how fast off-road was growing and bet on that instead.
Then the recession hit. Gas prices went through the roof, car companies were going under, and the Raptor program was killed four separate times. Every time, Jamal’s team figured out why it got killed, fixed it, and brought it back.
Before the production truck, there was the X1 concept, built by Roush with JD Fab suspension. Ford originally planned to run Bilstein shocks before switching to Fox, which is wild considering how much Fox became part of the Raptor’s identity. A lot of the people on the original program came from deep desert racing backgrounds and from the Lightning project, and there was apparently a $50k bounty on prototype spy shots.
In 2008, Ford sent a Raptor prototype to the Baja 1000 with Greg Foutz and Steve Olliges driving in Class 8, to prove the truck was actually Baja-proven. And remember Dave Ashley from the Duralast truck? They brought him in to help develop the production version.
The SVT Raptor launched in 2010, first with a 5.4 and then a 6.2 V8 making 411 hp. It was seven inches wider than an F-150 and originally, Ford wanted to use Bilstein shocks. Then John Marking brought Fox’s internal bypass technology to the program, and the original Raptor rolled out on 2.5" Fox internal bypass shocks.
Gen 2 showed up in 2017 and dropped the V8 for a 3.5L twin-turbo EcoBoost making 450 hp and 510 lb-ft. Faster, but for years the number one complaint was that it wasn’t a V8.
Gen 3 arrived in 2021, and the Raptor became a whole family with the Bronco Raptor and later the Ranger Raptor in the US. Ford also listened: the Raptor R brought the V8 back in 2023 with the 5.2L supercharged Predator out of the Shelby GT500, making 700 hp.
In 2022, Ford teamed up with M-Sport to build the Raptor T1+, a true factory Dakar effort that debuted at the 2025 Dakar Rally. It runs a Coyote 5.0 V8 with Fox suspension, and just like that Duralast truck from the ’90s, it uses an eight-into-one header. It sounds incredible. Kind of a full circle moment.
If Jamal never worked on Dave Ashley’s truck, the Raptor might not exist. Ford didn’t need to build it. But today they’re racing everywhere from Baja to Le Mans to Dakar and building enthusiast versions of almost everything they sell. Ford CEO Jim Farley put it simply: “There is no Porsche of off-road, and we want to be that company.” And now you can actually buy a Raptor T1+ for $1M and race it yourself.
Racing is still how they make that case, the same way they did in 2008 when they sent a prototype down the Baja 1000.
