Racing across the desert in the ferocious Ford Bronco DR
I swung my body over the door sill, strapped myself into the molded seat with a five-point safety belt and gripped the steering wheel with Nomex gloves. Exploding forward, I watched for the dashboard Christmas lights to blink red before upshifting, the engine’s controlled violence shaking the roll cage around me. Feels like a race car. Sounds like a race car. Except I am sitting 12 inches off the ground and slinging sand.
Welcome to the cockpit of the Bronco DR, Ford’s first purpose-built racing SUV — DR for Desert Racer. Bronco DR is made for dirt trails. Epic dirt trails like the SCORE Baja 1000 or the King of the Hammers here in California, where I got a brief taste of what it’s like to go off-road desert racing.
“This is a ground-up build,” said Ford Performance boss Mark Rushbrook of the turn-key customer racer that follows the Bronco R prototype Ford raced in the 2019-20 Baja 1000s. “(We’ve created) a desert racer that is competitionready coming out of the factory — something Ford has never done before.”
Later in the day, I rode shotgun with Vaughn Gitten Jr., a Ford factory racer. Like me, Gitten was raised on asphalt racing, and he’s a drift-racing legend as a two-time Formula Drift champion. He’s taken on a second career as an off-road pilot.
As we charged across the landscape, I remarked how desert racing seems to involve little drifting.
“Yeah, these cars have to navigate everything from sand to rocks to rough moguls, so ride-height and shock travel is key,” said Gittin through his helmet microphone. “It’s all about tire placement. But give me
a steering wheel and four tires and I’ll figure it out.”
To help off-road racers figure it out, the Bronco DR is a completely different weapon than, say, the Mustang GT4.
Like Mustang, Bronco is designed for productionbased class racing, so it starts life as a “body-inwhite” at Bronco’s Wayne, Michigan, assembly plant. Then it gets the VIP treatment. The chassis (Ford Performance has made 50) is shipped to Multimatic in Toronto. DR is then assembled with a Frankenstein’s parts list to make it an off-road monster.
While aesthetically similar to the production SUV, the DR’S fiberglass body panels are new and wrapped around a steel roll cage to protect drivers like me and my co-pilot: off-road Hall-offamer Curt Leduc. The all-wheel-drive chassis sits on big, sophisticated spool-valve Multimatic shocks and bead-locked 37-inch BF Goodrich Mudterrain T/A tires. The rear differential is taken from the F-150 pickup, the front from Bronco.
Gittin suggested leaving the transmission in automatic mode rather than use manual paddle shifters, so sophisticated is the 10-speed at managing torque.
Given the severity of the terrain, the drivetrain prefers low revs for easier transitions.
“Smoothness and reliability are rewarded on off-roading,” said my navigator Leduc. “Easy throttle, off the brake.”
I preferred the automatic shifter, keeping revs low at 2,000 to 3,000 rpm. That was just fine by the Coyote V-8, which is built for low-end torque. The exception was deep sand. There, the V-8’s 400-plus horsepower came in handy to keep from bogging down. The Bronco DR’S massive 65-gallon gas tank is key to getting it around Hammer’s 70-mile laps or 300-mile-long stages in the Baja 1000.
In time, I bonded with my bucking Bronco, learning its steering and braking habits. Unlike razor-sharp on-road racers, DR is designed for variable terrain with its shock absorbers and locking diffs. Oh, those shocks!