Ford’s Raptor Rally Tripled in Three Years — and Now It Ends at an F1 Race
Nearly 1,000 guests and more than 450 trucks showed up in Lake Havasu, up from about 300 at the first rally in 2024. Daniel Ricciardo’s next stop is Circuit of the Americas.
Ford's Raptor Rally has grown from a one-day meet for about 300 people into a two-day, 450-truck desert event in three years. The third edition ran October 16–17 in Lake Havasu, Arizona, and Ford says nearly 1,000 guests turned up with more than 450 F-150, Bronco, and Ranger Raptors.
For comparison, the first rally in 2024 drew roughly 300 owners, guests, and media to Fairfield, Utah, for a single day. Last year's event, the first in Lake Havasu, brought about 400 owners for a day and a half. This year added a day, a show-and-shine, a dedicated jump-watching zone, and the first Raptor Baja Sprint, a timed competition on a desert loop with a Ford instructor riding along.
Jumps, hot laps, and a Dakar truck
The draw for most attendees is the same as it was in 2024: a sanctioned place to jump their own truck. Ford also put its pro drivers to work. Loren Healy, Brad Lovell, Vaughn Gittin Jr., and Mitch Guthrie Jr. ran hot laps and meet-and-greets, while what a Baja 1000 winner says matters most in the F-150 Raptor — the shocks — got a two-day field test from several hundred owners at once.
The outlier on the trail was the Raptor T1+, the Dakar race truck that took second and third overall in January behind Nasser Al-Attiyah's Dacia. Ford Racing driver Christopher Polvoorde used it to give rides to rally-goers, which is about as close as a customer gets to a factory rally-raid car.
Ford timed the event to land on the final weekend of the Rebelle Rally, and the company spent part of Saturday celebrating a clean sweep there. Live scoring for the eight-day navigation rally shows Ranger Raptors first and second in the 4x4 class, with a Bronco Raptor third. Two of those crews, Laura Wanlass and Teralin Petereit and Karisa Haydon and Trista Smith, ran under Ford Racing colors; we set out the questions for the event in our 2026 Rebelle Rally preview.
Ticket prices show who Ford is targeting. General admission was $500, VIP was $1,000 with one guest, and a $12,500 package bundled the rally with access to the Red Bull Racing suite at the U.S. Grand Prix, according to Ford Authority. The Bronco Raptor, which our 2027 Ford Bronco guide covers in detail, was eligible alongside the F-150 and Ranger versions.
Next stop: Austin
That F1 tie-in is not a coincidence. Daniel Ricciardo, who signed on as a Global Ford Racing Ambassador in September 2025 with an explicit focus on the Raptor line, worked the rally and is now driving from Arizona to Texas with Rob Baird for the United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas on October 23–25. Ford is documenting the trip on its From the Road blog.
The thread connecting a desert owners' meet to a Formula 1 paddock is the Ford Racing brand itself. Ford has used the Raptor name on a Dakar podium, a Rebelle sweep, and a 450-truck customer event inside a single week, and it wants F1 fans in Austin to see all of it as one program. Whether that translates into truck sales is harder to measure, but the rally's growth curve suggests the owners, at least, are buying in.
Ford hasn't announced dates or a location for a fourth rally. Given that this year's tickets sold out, don't expect it to shrink.
