1967 Ford F-100 Prerunner Gets Some Serious Hang Time
Who said the Raptor gets to have all the fun? This 530-horsepower F-100 may be old, but it’s hard to tell when it’s flying through the air.
There are five basic things you can do in a Ford F-Series truck. You can use one as basic A-to-B transportation. The bed allows you to haul heavy loads. Need to move heavier stuff? Hook a trailer to its hitch or 5th-wheel connection and tow it to where you need it to be. The SVT Lightning was designed for fast driving (and making Camaros look bad). In trucks like the Raptor, you can fly across the desert. That’s exactly what Lucas Oil Midwest Short Course League racer Christopher Polvoorde does in this video behind the wheel of his 1967 F-100 prerunner.
It definitely keeps a lot of the look of the vintage truck it’s based on, but it features several necessary upgrades to make it capable of zooming across harsh terrain at high speeds.
Polvoorde’s F-100 features a robust suspension setup with twin I beams. Up front, there are 4.0-inch coilovers that provide 24 inches of travel. In the back, there’s another pair of 4.0-inch coilovers that offer so much travel that Polvoorde and his team had to limit it to 30 inches. Polvoorde said, “Trust me. It does the job.”
Underneath all of that suspension hardware is a set of 17-inch wheels wrapped in meaty 37-inch all-terrain tires. There are two backup wheel/tire combos in the “bed,” as well as a tool kit. Above that there’s a chase rack equipped with a pair of fire extinguishers.
There’s another one in the cabin – a great thing to have considering Polvoorde’s truck almost burned to the ground after a run through the desert. He doesn’t have to burn up, though. He doesn’t even have to break a sweat while he’s driving the F-100 because it’s equipped with air conditioning. In fact, the rest of the cockpit is surprisingly luxurious given how focused on performance the rest of the truck is. There’s a lot of leather in there. Polvoorde and his crew run their GPS off of an iPod that fits right in the middle of the center controls. He can even charge his phone wirelessly while he’s on the move.
Polvoorde’s rig differs from other F-100s in another major way: it has a GM power plant. He said, “It’s got an LS3, so Chevrolet LS3. About 530 horsepower. The reason we did that is cheap power.”
That may seem like blasphemy, but it’s easy to forget once Polvoorde puts all of that power to the sand. The long-travel suspension instantly flexes in every direction to allow the chunky tires to make maximum contact with the slippery surface. But that’s not the point of Polvoorde’s blast through the desert. He’s there to get some air. Polvoorde gets plenty of it after he hits a target bump in the terrain. He launches into the sky and the suspension fully rebounds. Instead of landing with a parts-scattering crash, the F-100 just soaks up the rapid compression and keeps roaring forward.
That’s nothing new for the F-100 – and Polvoorde knows it because he knows a little Ford truck history. “There’s a video of … the old Fords … when they came out with the I beams. It was like this big deal because they worked so good and it’s like a bone-stock one of these hitting this [rough desert] stuff.”
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