Ford Almost Made a Third-Gen F-150 SVT Lightning Before Pivoting to the Raptor
Ford’s special vehicles team quickly caught the off-roading bug after deeming a new F-150 SVT Lightning unfeasible.
Many consider the Ford F-150 Raptor to be a successor of sorts to the Ford F-150 SVT Lightning, even though the two are separated by several model years, with the former a high-performance off-roader and the latter representing a high-performance on-road pickup. This notion makes sense, because both offer plenty in the way of upgrades, in spite of their obvious differences. However, as the Blue Oval recently revealed, the ties between these two vehicles are actually tighter than one might think.
In fact, FoMoCo was actually working on developing a third-gen F-150 SVT Lightning in the mid-2000s after the F-150 received a redesign for the 2004 model year. However, there was one big problem – consumer studies indicated that Lightning buyers wanted not only more power, but also more payload and towing capacity. That would have required adding weight to the sporty pickup, as well as a big enough investment that Ford would have to price it high enough that it wouldn’t have been feasible for most.
Around that same time, SVT chief nameplate engineer Jamal Hameedi – an avid desert racer – noticed that a lot of F-150 buyers were spending a ton of money upgrading them to enhance their off-road capability. He wondered – would those same customers buy a factory-built, turnkey, high-performance off-roader? To figure out if this was feasible, SVT put together a special 2006 F-150 with an upgraded suspension, supercharger, and 35-inch tires, then headed out to the deserts of Borrego Springs in California for some testing.
“We were on the verge of doing something incredibly wonderful or incredibly stupid,” said Ford engineer Eric Zinkosky, who was responsible for much of the suspension and vehicle dynamics work on that prototype. Turns out, the SVT team had so much fun behind the wheel that they couldn’t wipe the smiles off of their faces. The icing on the cake came when Ford entered a mostly-stock pre-production F-150 Raptor in the legendary Baja 1000 and it took home a third-place class finish.
The rest, as they say, is history, and the F-150 Raptor recently entered its third generation with demand for the hardcore off-roader proving to be as high as ever. Soon, the V8 will make a return to that model as well, for the first time since its first generation, in the form of the supercharged, Predator-powered Raptor R. And while this may not be much of a consolation prize to some, it is interesting to note that FoMoCo was considering a third-gen Ford F-150 SVT Lightning, at least.
Photos: Ford
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