Australian engineers and designers given the reins on Ranger Raptor program

When it comes to designing and engineering a brand new product for a car company, there’s a degree of latitude international markets are given when it comes to the whole process.

With Ford Australia being one of the main engine rooms for Ranger and Everest, they were given the reins when it came to the next-generation Ranger Raptor and were given a great deal of latitude to create a performance pickup truck that would need to stand on its own two feet in every global market from Australia to the US.

Speaking exclusive to CarExpert, Ford Performance program manager Justin Capicchiano explained that the Aussie engineers had guidelines to work with, but ultimately they were able to be creative in the whole process.

“There’s a…I’ll call it a ‘Ford Performance DNA’. And it’s, it’s a, big document that sort of covers off everything from interior to exterior concept, like, what does a Ford Performance product need to have?” Capicchiano said.

“It’s like a cookbook. And then as long as you’re ticking off those elements, you have freedom and expression.”

“So you know how design guys work with that DNA and look at it and say, well, you know, vents needs to be functional for example. Okay, so where do we want to put functional vents? And then they won’t put any on that aren’t functional.

“You know, those kinds of things is like a simple example of how that works. North America doesn’t say to us, you must put a vent there. They’ll say if you put one there, it’s got to be functional.”

Capicchiano started first working on the Ranger Raptor in its initial form in 2017, just two years after the release of the original Ranger Raptor.

The customer feedback from that product (particularly around the engine and straight line performance) influenced where the company would go.

It also helped that on the same platform (T6) Ford was working in parallel on the Bronco, which needed to spawn its own Raptor variant.

The Bronco Raptor shares a lot of engine and suspension components with the Ranger Raptor and it meant those economies of scales could be applied to deliver a product that is world’s apart from the original in terms of power and performance.

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