Pages, some stolen, some original

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Race Truck


2017 F-150 Ecoboost vs All
via Road & Track

When I was in high school, the Mustang something-er-other and the Camaro Z-28 were the kings of street drag racing, reaching 100 MPH in a quarter mile and doing it in 13 seconds. The Ford pickup truck in the video has had some work done to it, but not much. The four-wheel drive apparently lets it get off the line quicker than the rear-wheel drive cars, and drivers of some of those other cars may have been asleep at the wheel, but still. It's a flipping pickup truck, not a race car.

Ford V6 Engine with dual turbochargers
And the engine is like something out of Star Wars, or maybe Italy. All good pickup trucks, like mine, use large displacement, cast iron V8 engines. This Ford engine is tiny, aluminum, and turbocharged, and it doesn't have just one turbocharger, it has two! Ten years ago this was something wanna-be racers dreamed about, now it's the stock engine in a work-a-day pickup truck. The world is changing, and it's changing faster.

Ford / GM 10 speed automatic transmission
Having ten different gear ratios in a transmission sounds excessive to me, but I suppose there's a good reason for it. Maybe the gear guys are feeling pressure from the electric motor folks.

The current truck with the new, smaller engine and the aluminum body weighs 600 pounds less than the old iron monsters they were building just a couple years ago. (4,051 pounds vs. 4,685).


No comments:

Post a Comment