Rally-raid trucks built to FIA’s Dakar rulebook aren’t supposed to show up at an American desert race and immediately run with the locals. Ford did exactly that this month, and the result should make everyone who builds purpose-made desert racers a little uneasy.
At the Casey Folks Vegas to Reno, one of the longest one-day off-road races in the country, Ford Racing entered its Raptor T1+ rally-raid truck for the first time on American soil, and for the first time in any competition outside international rally raid. Driver Mitch Guthrie Jr. and co-driver Kellon Walch brought it home second overall, covering roughly 500 miles of Nevada desert, about 800 kilometers, in 7 hours and 43 minutes with no mechanical trouble beyond a single puncture.
Second place doesn’t sound like a headline until you consider what Ford didn’t do to get there. The team didn’t build a special version of the truck for American desert racing. It entered the Raptor T1+ in the same configuration it runs at the Dakar Rally: full FIA T1+ specification, complete with the regulatory limiters that cap what the truck is allowed to do internationally. American desert racing’s fastest classes answer to a different rulebook entirely, one with considerably more room to build outright speed. A truck racing with a regulatory harness on very nearly out-ran a field that wasn’t wearing one.
The Truck Underneath the Result
The Raptor T1+ is a joint project between Ford Racing and British rally outfit M-Sport, built for FIA’s toughest cross-country rally-raid category. It runs a Coyote-based 5.0-liter V8, a purpose-built chassis, and long-travel FOX suspension, all packaged to survive multi-stage events that rack up thousands of kilometers over some of the roughest terrain on the planet. The program isn’t new to results either; it already carries a second- and third-place finish from the 2026 Dakar Rally earlier this year. What Vegas to Reno added wasn’t proof of speed so much as proof of range: a rally-raid platform tuned for international competition holding together just as well against a completely different style of racing, without a single component changed for the occasion.
A Stress Test Disguised as a Race
Ford Racing and M-Sport had two separate reasons for showing up in Nevada. The obvious one was to see how a globally-built rally-raid truck stacks up against machines engineered specifically for American desert racing. The more practical one was mileage. Vegas to Reno packed close to 800 kilometers of competition into a single day, nearly double what the team typically covers in one Dakar stage, giving engineers a concentrated load test on the truck and its components ahead of the next Dakar Rally.
M-Sport program manager Matthew Wilson said the team got exactly the data it came for, and that reliability, not outright pace, was the number that mattered most: finishing 500-plus miles of desert with nothing worse than a flat tire tells engineers more than a class trophy would. Guthrie admitted the crew wasn’t entirely sure what to expect running a fully Dakar-limited truck against desert-race specialists. By the finish line, he was calling it, simply, “just the start.”
Two Drivers, One Homecoming
The result carried personal weight for both men in the cockpit. Guthrie grew up racing American desert events and spent a decade competing at Vegas to Reno specifically before shifting his career toward international rally-raid and eventually joining Ford Racing’s Raptor T1+ program. Running the truck at Vegas to Reno put both halves of his career in the same seat for the first time. Walch, a Nevada native, was racing what amounts to his own backyard, a detail that made the podium finish land differently for him than any stage of Dakar could.
Why 2026 Specifically
The timing isn’t incidental. Ford Racing is marking 125 years since Henry Ford’s own racing win in 1901, a victory that helped secure the credibility and financial backing to launch the company, while the United States marks its 250th anniversary this year. Ford leaned into both milestones by bringing one of its most international competition vehicles home and putting American drivers behind the wheel. That kind of anniversary marketing usually rings a little hollow, but a genuine fight for the overall podium gives it something real to point to beyond nostalgia.
What happens next is the more interesting question. Ford Racing hasn’t said whether the Raptor T1+ will return to American desert racing on a regular basis, and running a Dakar-specification truck against a home-turf field is a novelty that works cleanly exactly once as a story. But as a data point, Vegas to Reno suggests Ford’s rally-raid program has more range than its Dakar results alone show. If you’d rather watch American rally racing without a factory budget attached, the American Rally Association’s stage rally scene has been just as busy this month, from Minnesota’s Ojibwe Forests Rally to Tennessee’s Overmountain Rally, a completely different flavor of the same sport, run on local budgets instead of global ones.
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