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A Raptor With No Mufflers Sounds a Lot Like a Ford GT
Wanna make Le Mans race car sounds? Just chop the mufflers off your EcoBoost Raptor.
The current-generation Ford F-150 Raptor uses a 3.5-liter twin-turbo EcoBoost V6—an engine that shares dimensions and basic layout with the one powering the Ford GT. That fact may have perplexed die-hard old-schoolers, who believe that off-road desert trucks and Le Mans racers alike should be powered by N/A V8s, no exceptions.
That concern has mostly dissipated. The Raptor is a rowdy delight, on road or off, and the Ford GT is proving so popular, sales of the car are spurring legal action.
But this shared use of a mid-displacement twin-turbo V6 leads to some unexpected consequences—namely, that if you chop the mufflers off your Raptor, you end up with a truck that sounds a bit like Ford's Le Mans winner.
We learned this today, when Roush Performance put out a video demonstrating the tuning shop's new $700 Raptor muffler-delete kit. (Side note: While the direct-fit straight pipes in Roush's kit look to be of top-notch quality, utilizing the factory exhaust routing and hangers, something about dropping seven bills on a mod you could functionally replicate with a Sawzall leaves me puzzled.) Go ahead, take a listen:
Sound familiar? Here's the stock Ford GT (which, being a street-legal car, has some amount of exhaust muffling) for comparison:
And finally, here's the Ford GT LM GTE, the purpose-built race car that also uses a 3.5-liter twin-turbo V6—the car that won the GTE class of Le Mans in 2016, took second place in-class in 2017, and third-in-class this year:
On the other hand, it's kind of cool to think that you can buy a gnarly high-speed off-road pickup truck that shares its heart with a Le Mans winning race car and an immensely sought-after supercar. And listen closely: All three EcoBoost vehicles rev to roughly the same redline under hard acceleration. They play the same musical notes, just with a slightly different tone, like comparing two different saxophones by plaing the same song.
It's neat, in a subversive kind of way, that this gnarly pickup truck, built for high-speed off-roading, can sing to you in a voice you might just hear wailing down the Mulsanne. Provided you're willing to ditch the mufflers.
