When Romain Dumas whizzed over the top of the legendary 12.42-mile Pikes Peak hill climb in 8 minutes, 53.553 seconds, there were mixed feelings at Ford. On the one hand, his Ford F-150 Lightning SuperTruck had set the fastest time of the event, but on the other, the Frenchman’s time could have been even faster.
An unprecedented but short-lived technical glitch with a sensor in the battery management system – as Dumas passed through a dead zone on the mountain that prevented live telemetry from being transmitted on board – forced him to stop and would cost him 26 seconds before he could get going again. That explains a 5.871-second delay to the time set by Dumas in the extraordinary SuperVan 4.2 in 2023.
But in every other respect, as Sriram Pakkam, director of F1 and high-performance electric vehicles at Ford Performance, says, “from a title perspective and from a learning perspective,” the goals have been achieved.
“When everything else worked well, it’s a testament to the quality of our development tools,” he told Motorsport.com a few days after the event. “The results were pretty consistent with what we were seeing on our simulators and with all of our computational methods. It was all really validated and nothing unexpected happened on any of those fronts. The results were very close to what we thought they should have been originally, so we’re pretty happy with that.”
Electric demonstrators are one of four strands of Ford’s motorsport strategy, alongside its Formula 1 powertrain push in 2026 with Red Bull, off-road events including the World Rally Championship and from 2025 the Dakar Rally, and its Mustang programmes in GT3, GT4, Australian Supercars and NASCAR. The aim of the electric vehicle demonstrators, Pakkam explains, is to push the boundaries of technology outside of existing series that have prescriptive rules.
“This type of electrification arena that has emerged in the last decade is still quite new and you need a place where you can push the limits of physics and not an arbitrary set of rules,” he says. “From that perspective, it’s a great place to play because there are virtually no artificial rules that you’re designing by.”
“For engineers, it’s the best place to learn because you just say, ‘OK, these are your limits, they’re the same ones you’ve seen in a textbook.’ It’s just physics: ‘Keep pushing and get the best result.’ And there’s a freedom that you don’t easily find anywhere else. The Motorsports Group always designs to a rule book and so for all engineers, it’s a great model to play around and do things they would never do.”
The 2023 F-150 Lightning SuperTruck was slower than the SuperVan 4.2, but only because of a sensor issue early in Dumas’ race
Photo by: Ford Performance
Pakkam estimates a team of 26 people worked on the design of the Lightning SuperTruck, which has been in development since last fall in what was a short gestation period.
Weight
Keeping weight to a minimum was not only a major challenge, but also an important element that guided design decisions. The weight implications of the pursuit of performance were a “constant trade-off that had to be constantly worked on” for Pakkam and his team.
“It’s pretty easy to get more aerodynamics and power because it’s an attribute that’s controlled by a few experts,” he explains. “Weight is trickier because it’s the distributed attribute that literally everyone is responsible for. It’s about working hard with everyone. Are you designing your mounts more efficiently and effectively?”
“If we put a fourth motor in the Pikes Peak configuration, you’ll get a little over 2,000 hp, but that’s a lot more power than your simulations need.”
Sri Pakkam
For Pakkam, the weight factor at Pikes Peak is “the most sensitive parameter that you can manipulate and change to get a better lap time.” Unlike power, downforce and energy density, he says the benefits of weight reduction “never fade.”
“For us, weight was a key consideration as we maximized what we knew Pikes Peak responded to. [on power]so we reached that limit,” Pakkam reveals. “The aero also started to stagnate.
“We managed to get out about 100 kg [compared to SuperVan 4.2]. On a big vehicle, it’s always a lower percentage than we would have liked.” While not as heavy as a street truck, “compared to any race car, it’s pretty heavy,” he adds.
Powertrain
As with the SuperVan 4.2, which set the fastest time at the Goodwood Festival of Speed hillclimb last week, Ford has tapped STARD to design the powertrain for its Lightning SuperTruck. The Austrian company, led by former World Rally Championship driver Manfred Stohl, has supplied three 6-phase UHP motors and ultra-high-performance NMC Li-Polymer cells (or a battery in common parlance). These elements contribute to an impressive 1,600 hp.
Ford passed up the opportunity for more power because it considered the weight disadvantage too great.
Photo by: Ford Performance
“We needed a race-ready transmission that was proven on the track, and STARD positioned itself in that niche,” Pakkam says. “We looked for partners and they were a great fit. They’re engineering-focused. The foundation was solid. You have well-cooled batteries, well-cooled motors, a pretty power-dense package. That’s what we needed at the time and we’ve continued to improve it ever since.”
One engine is mounted at the front, the other two at the rear. Power distribution and torque balance are easily adjusted using rotary knobs on the steering wheel, allowing the driver to adjust balance issues without having to stop first and make shock absorber or aerodynamic changes.
Pakkam says it is possible to add a fourth motor, as the SuperVan 4.2 did when it broke the Bathurst electric lap record earlier this year, but it was decided that wasn’t necessary for Pikes Peak with the extra weight and battery drain it would entail – potentially resulting in less punch out of slow corners for a potentially higher top speed that it would rarely achieve.
“If we add a fourth motor to the Pikes Peak setup, we’ll get a little over 2,000 horsepower, but that’s a lot more power than you need in your simulations,” Pakkam says. “Plus, you’re adding weight and you’re consuming more energy.”
Aero and style
Ford has “pushed the envelope on the SuperVan 4.2,” says Pakkam, who points to a nearly 30 percent increase in downforce on the Lightning SuperTruck. Its complex three-piece front wing, massive rear spoiler, and detailed work on the headlight ducts and cooling grilles are the result of many hours—“hundreds for sure,” notes Pakkam—of CFD that Ford says produces 6,000 pounds of downforce at 150 mph.
“From October to March, we basically ran CFDs on all of our picks, all the time,” he says.
Lessons learned from the SuperVan’s development played a role in that choice, including packaging decisions for the battery and motors that resulted in “a better aerodynamic floor and a much larger diffuser.” Aerodynamic sensitivity was “what we were primarily looking for,” alongside drag considerations, he adds.
Pakkam says the temptation to share parts between programs for cost reasons has been avoided, describing the SuperTruck as “pretty bespoke at the moment,” largely because “the design is very different.”
Lessons learned from the SuperVan 4.2 helped shape the styling of the SuperTruck, which features a dramatic rear diffuser
Photo by: Ford Performance
The desire to “extend development time as long as possible” and delay the start of testing was partly driven by the lack of sites that offered testing conditions comparable to Pikes Peak. Once the physical vehicle began testing at “as close a facility as possible,” which involved visiting proving grounds in Austria and Hungary that were “absolutely not representative of how we would like it to be,” the changes made were not significant.
“The set-up obviously changes, we had to make some minor aero adjustments and add a few small bits, but we play on the margins,” Pakkam explains. “Once we get to the track we change the tyre compounds, the anti-roll bars, we change the aero a bit, nothing major.”
Frame
Rather than being based on a stock F-150 chassis, the Lightning SuperTruck resembles a 4.2 SuperVan with a tube-frame construction. The need to install a solid roll cage was a big factor in this decision.
Bespoke Pirelli tyres were developed for the Pikes Peak race because, as Pakkam says, “they’re not used to this combination of power, weight and aerodynamics.”
“We’ve made our demonstrators in my group that are a production vehicle with hot racing elements added,” he says. “The [F-150] Lightning Switchgear is like that, where we basically have a production truck but with parts from our off-road racing program and you can race in the desert at high speeds.
“But we’re looking at another aspect: we’re stressing production parts and transmissions and we’re looking at what happens to them. With that, we’re trying different things, focusing a lot on aerodynamics and how to maximize energy consumption and that kind of thing.”
Tires and brakes
Bespoke Pirelli tyres were developed for the Pikes Peak race, as Pakkam says “it stretches a race car in a way they don’t normally see, they’re not used to that combination of power, weight and aerodynamics”. The starting point of the GT3 rubber used by the new Mustang in the GT World Challenge Europe had to be tweaked to accommodate the significantly greater aerodynamic performance and mass.
“For all involved, it’s quite unique,” he says. “It’s a constant game of monitoring, with Pirelli helping us with recommendations on everything from warm-up procedures to the best compounds for that day based on what they know. So we’re constantly working with them to figure out what we should put on these things. Because we don’t know yet how all these things react to such a unique vehicle and they’re helping us understand that.”
Stopping is provided by Alcon carbon-ceramic brakes.
Custom tires developed for F-150 Lightning SuperTruck by Pirelli
Photo by: Ford Performance