If the name’s any indication, the Ford Maverick Lobo might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Sure, it looks like a sportier version of the pickup truck, but Ford wants you to know you can also do sporty things with it. Specifically, its engineering team designed it with autocross and drifting in mind.
Say what?
The Lobo was inspired by a 2021 SEMA build. Tucci Hot Rods customized a Maverick in conjunction with the design studio at Ford. That got the Ford folks wondering: What can they do from the performance side?
The Tucci Hot Rods Ford Maverick displayed during the 2021 SEMA Show.
“We put together a couple of passionate engineers and created a skunkworks kind of team where we built a truck just like our customers would,” says Kirk Leonard, Maverick Vehicle Integration Supervisor. “We took a pre-production prototype and started throwing the best performance parts we could at it. Those performance upgrades made it enhance the already fun-to-drive Maverick. Once we did that, we realized that this thing had performance potential and we could get a fun-to-drive vehicle that could turn and rotate for our customers in autocross or drifting.”
Ford started with the all-wheel-drive Ford Maverick Lariat that comes with the 2.0-liter EcoBoost engine. Then, just like many racers would do, engineers dropped the ride height by about a half-inch up front and more than an inch in the rear. (And for those wondering about the Lobo’s dimensions for autocross, it measures 67.7 inches at its tallest, with a track width 63.1 inches at its narrowest.) The Ford team also installed stiffer springs and different shocks to help body roll and cornering.
“We started raiding the parts bin,” says Keith Daugherty, Maverick Vehicle Integration Engineer. “We updated the cooling package, because we have a 4K Tow Package, so that gives us a bigger radiator and fan. We have a transmission oil cooler that was in production, so we put it on there. Then, we started looking outside the Maverick, and we saw a steering gear from the Kuga, the European version of the Escape. It’s not something you’d think of as sporty or performance, but it has a faster ratio for the steering rack. Combine that with stiffer strut mounts from a Mach-E and all that helps with steering on the front end.”
Front end–check.
“Anytime you go faster you’re going to need to stop faster,” Keith continues. “So, we grabbed brakes from the European…
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