Yahoo Autos For You Are Dust: Returning the Ford Bronco Raptor to the Mint 400
Primm, Nevada, is a sad place. The roller coaster at Buffalo Bill’s Casino hasn’t run in years. The outlet mall is shuttered. The best restaurant in town? It’s a battle between Denny’s and IHOP inside casinos on either side of I-15. But there is one overwhelmingly great thing about Primm: the Mint 400.
This story originally appeared in Volume 17 of Road & Track.
And Ford’s new Bronco Raptor is the Mint 400 manifest as a consumer product.
The Mint is more than an off-road race. It died once but was resurrected. It has outlived the downtown Las Vegas hotel after which it’s named, survived the scorn of environmentalists, and leveraged the psychedelic attention of Hunter S. Thompson into enduring legend. It’s a mix of dust, sand, mud, endangered tortoises, high-octane racing fuel, and obscure IPAs. It’s a multiday carnival of communal camping, kids driving ATVs, trucker caps, and, inevitably, dogs wearing sunglasses.
California’s Bill Stroppe built the first racing Bronco to compete in the initial Mexican 1000 (now Baja 1000) run in the fall of 1967. Piloted by Ray Harvick and co-driven by Stroppe, it led most of the race before breaking. But the experience was enough for Stroppe to goad and tease his friend Parnelli Jones to take on off-road racing. So Stroppe built another production-based Bronco for Jones and him to take on the first Mint 400 in 1968.
“I enjoyed the Baja races as much as any when it comes to having fun,” Parnelli Jones said in 2013. But it was the 1968 Mint 400 where he first competed in off-road racing. That Bronco was too fragile for Jones’s balls-out driving style. Hitting a wash at speed, the production-based Bronco disintegrated. “I cauliflowered the rims,” he recalled to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2014. “They had to take a torch to it.”
Until that first Mint, the Bronco had been an agricultural implement for farmers needing to get through muck or folks seeking obscure fishing spots. It was a niche market, and Ford barely made 14,000 of the cars in 1967. But on big wheels and tires, with the fearless Parnelli behind the wheel, the racing Bronco became a legend.
The new Bronco Raptor shamelessly exploits the image established by Stroppe and Jones and their racing Broncos. Riding atop 37-inch-tall, 12.5-inch-wide BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/A KO2 tires, swollen by fender flares that push overall width to 85.7 inches (5.7 inches wider than an F-250 Super Duty pickup), and with a face that practically snarls, it has an astonishing presence.
Each Mint 400 starts with a blocks-long party on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. This year almost 500 race teams competing in more than 50 classes lined up along Fremont, where anyone could wander amid the Bugs, buggies, UTVs, and trophy trucks as they meandered slowly toward tech inspection.
The Bronco Raptor was royalty along Fremont. Here it had as much cachet as a Ferrari SF90 at Monte Carlo. And if there had been an SF90 around, the crowd would have been rooting for the “Braptor” to drive over it.
Back in 1966, when Ford introduced the Bronco, it listed the lightest version at 2750 pounds and the heaviest at 3025 pounds. The Braptor crunches the scales at a staggering 5764 pounds. That’s 11 pounds shy of those two ’66 Broncos put together.
And as with the earliest ’66s, Ford doesn’t put a V-8 in any current street-legal Bronco. Instead, the Braptor relies on a 3.0-liter version of Ford’s EcoBoost twin-turbocharged V-6 rated at 418 hp at 5750 rpm and 440 lb-ft of peak torque at 2750 rpm. Alas, the 450-hp 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6 used in the F-150 Raptor hasn’t made it to its Bronco brother. Maybe Ford is holding that back for the inevitable Bronco Raptor R that’s likely to appear someday.
Getting into the Bronco Raptor takes an athletic leap or strong grip and a determined tug. The driver faces a 12-inch digital instrument cluster with another 12-inch screen atop the dash center. Some useful cameras pointing forward and rear helpfully display terrain during rock crawls, but there’s nothing digital here that matters too much.
What matters is how thoroughly Ford Performance has beefed up the Bronco’s structure, fortified many components, fitted super-trick shocks, and it all rides on the best all-around off-road tires ever fitted to a production four-by.
