Arizona - Let us not be coy here, the world’s most desirable double-cab bakkie is Ford’s F150 Raptor. With its Fox racing suspension, turbocharged 3.5-litre EcoBoost V6 and no less than ten forward gears, the Raptor will do everything in full-scale that your favourite RC off-road racing toy does in the back yard.
Troublingly, for some the Raptor is simply not larger or sufficiently capable. If you require the ability to jump your Ford bakkie, or enjoy outrunning traffic whilst racing alongside the highway on gravel, some very resourceful Americans have created a MegaRaptor.
Humongous bakkie
Far too often the world ‘mega’ is used incorrectly. In the case of F250R, it most certainly is not. The company’s name – F250R – is ample clue as to what they do: converting Ford’s humongous F250 and F350 bakkies to Raptor specification.
F250R are a Ford aftermarket bakkie workshop based in Tucson, Arizona, and if you give them a new F250 (or F350) and R400 000, they’ll build you a MegaRaptor.
What do you get for your money and patience? Well, rather big wheels, for a start. Off-road enthusiasts usually get all giddy about mounting 36" tyres on their double-cabs, whilst 40s are seen as borderline insanity. MegaRaptor? It rolls 46" Micheline XZL rubber. The calibre of stuff usually reserved for military vehicles.
The logic…
The logic of these massive tyres is to add flotation and provide additional cushioning when powering across broken terrain at speed. Aiding the wheel stroke required to house those tyres, and not have them rub or bump through on the MegaRaptor’s bodywork, is a custom suspension solution from Icon.
Swapping out Icon’s standard dampers for plusher Bilstein 5100-series shocks ensure the perfect balance between roll-over mitigation and terrain absorption. The total lift gained for MegaRaptor with this combination Icon/Bilstein suspension set-up is 100m. Not a huge gain, but considering the performance on offer, F250R’s engineers had to keep MegaRaptor’s centre-of-gravity within acceptable parameters.
V8 power
Performance. There’s quite a lot of it on offer. Where F150 Raptor is a turbocharged V6, the Mega is a boosted V8. And it’s a diesel, as real workhorse bakkies are supposed to be. There is no lingering irony about a ‘Raptor’ fuelled by truck fuel, as Ford’s 6.7-litre Powerstroke V8 benefits from a custom crafted exhaust and boats incredible output figures.
MegaRaptor’s huge V8 spins a peak power figure of 430kW, but the number which really gets those heavy-duty Michelin tyres rotating, are the 1600Nm of torque. Unstoppable? One would most certainly think so.