Australia’s Repco Supercars Championship has ditched the Ford Mustang safety car it has used in recent years and replaced it with the all-new Ford Ranger Raptor.
While there’s no denying that the Mustang is better suited to track use than the Ranger Raptor, the safety car serves as an important marketing tool for Ford Performance and given that it is its latest and most exciting model, it’s hardly a surprise that it will be getting some airtime throughout this year’s Supercars Championship.
The Ranger Raptor has been adorned with a fluorescent yellow paint scheme with blue and green accents to signify bp’s role as the official fuel supplier for the racing series. A Ford Mustang GT will be used as a reserve safety car throughout the season while the Ford Escape ST-Line serves as the medical car and will be driven by medical delegate Dr. Carl Le.
Read: Ford Recalls 2023 Bronco, Ranger After Wheel Falls Off, Allegedly Hits Another Vehicle
“Ranger is one of Australia’s best-selling vehicles, and the Raptor is the Ford Performance variant, built to tackle almost anything you can throw at it,” Ford Australia general manager of marketing communications, John Hatzimanolis said. “We’re looking forward to surprising people with the performance and versatility of Raptor as the bp Ultimate Safety Car this year, it will be fantastic to see our flagship performance truck leading the Supercars pack.”
The current Ford Ranger Raptor is a significant upgrade over the previous-generation model. Rather than power coming from a bi-turbo 2.0-liter four-cylinder diesel as it did in the previous Ranger Raptor, grunt is now provided by a twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter EcoBoost V6 petrol that in Australian specification churns out 392 hp and 430 lb-ft (583 Nm) of torque.
Paired exclusively to this engine is a 10-speed automatic transmission. The Ranger Raptor also sports a permanent four-wheel drive system, a two-speed transfer case, front and rear electronic diff-locks, and should you be brave enough, can be driven in rear-wheel drive-only mode.
