From the outside, they look like fairly similarly performing trucks but the new Ram packs 250 more HP than Ford’s 3.5l EcoBoost Motor making it worlds apart in terms of stock performance. Calibrated Power’s latest goal has been to turn the Raptor into a TRX worthy competitor.
Meet Our Shop Truck:
- 2019 Ford F-150 Raptor
- 1000cc Fuel Injector Clinic injectors
- Calibrated Power EZ Lynk Custom Tuning
The TRX has a reported quarter mile time of 12.9 seconds from the factory, but in an independent test conducted by “Car and Driver” the TRX put down a time of 12.3 seconds in the same distance. This will be the time that we're trying to beat since we’ve seen other independent tests showing better times than the 12.9 seconds reported by Dodge. In another Independent test from Car and Driver, the newest generation of the Raptor was able to run the quarter mile in around 13.9 seconds.
Clearly, we're going to need to make some more power to get that number down by over a second and a half. Luckily we can easily calculate just how much more power we’ll need by plugging some numbers into a quarter-mile time calculator until we see the desired outcome of 12.3 seconds. Quarter mile calculators can be found all over the internet but the one we chose to use can be found HERE.
If we plug in our stock Raptor specs of 5750lbs and 450HP at the crank, we see an approximate quarter mile time of 14.1 seconds, which is almost exactly what we see in real life. However, When we put our Raptor on the dyno it averaged 394 rear wheel horsepower on 93 octane gas, which if we plug in rear wheel horsepower instead of crank horsepower to the hp calculator we get approximately the same quarter-mile time of 14.1 seconds. Now that we’ve got those figures down, we can plug in bigger and bigger figures for rear-wheel horsepower into the calculator until we see a quarter-mile time of around the desired 12.3 seconds we want to hit. With 5750lbs for the weight and 610rwhp entered into the calculator, we get an approximate quarter-mile time of 12.3 seconds. Exactly what we’re looking for to beat the TRX. This means our Raptor will need to make at least 610rwhp to be able to compete with the performance of the TRX in the quarter mile.
The first part of our process began with tuning the truck to see what kind of power it could make with stock parts alone. This along with data logging will show us where our limiting factors are and help us decide what should be upgraded to get the power we’re seeking. Our first step was putting the truck on the dyno to get our base numbers. Like was stated previously we recorded 3 runs averaging out to 394 rear-wheel horsepower. Next we began writing our tune. After dialing in the tune and doing some more dyno runs the Raptor ended up putting down 538rwhp on 93 octane gas. That's over 130hp gained from tuning alone, and If we plug our new hp to our quarter mile calculator we can see that the truck should have picked up over a second in the quarter mile! We're getting pretty close to our goal of 12.3 seconds too with a new estimated quarter mile time of 12.8 seconds. Yet we still need to make about 75hp to reach our goal of at least 610hp. So what parts do we upgrade first?
While tuning can adjust timing and air fuel ratios, there’s one more way to make the power that tuning can’t adjust. The volume of air entering the combustion chamber is the next thing that will need to be "boosted" to get more power out of the engine. In the case of the turbo-charged EcoBoost, the best way to accomplish this will be to upgrade the turbos.
Our stock turbos are limiting our power at around 538rwhp and we want at least 610hp out of the truck. To figure out how much bigger of a turbo we’ll need, we'll have to find something we can measure from the turbo that relates to the power we can expect to see. Luckily, we know that we can roughly translate the pounds of air per minute that a turbo can move into a horsepower figure the engine has the potential to make with that kind of flow. Generally, the case is for every 1lbs/min of air a turbo can move 10hp are possible to be made. So using that equation we will need two turbos that can move a combined 61lbs/min of air to make the desired 610hp. We know our stock turbo’s are 39mm Garrett’s that are rated for around 25lbs/min per turbo.However, we were able to get something more like 27lbs/min out of them in our testing.
We know that we will need to upgrade to something that can at least put out 30lbs/min totaling up to 60lbs/min with both turbos feeding the system. Checking around similar 46mm turbos can move up to 33lbs/min of air. That’s even more than we require. So for our truck, we had a set of custom 46mm turbos made to fit the exact specs we wanted. This will give us enough airflow to make 650hp which means we should be able to get the 610hp we’re looking for out of them.
Overall our goal is to reach the performance level of a TRX with as few performance upgrades as possible. However, with a 250hp difference in engine performance, it won’t be easy. Tuning was the first step which made a huge difference however it also revealed that the turbos needed to be upgraded in order to reach the kind of performance we are looking for out of the engine. More tuning will be required to see just what kind of power we can makes with the new turbos and what the next set of changes may need to be. Stay tuned for further updates to come on the project and to see the outcome of tuning the Raptor’s new upgraded 46mm turbos.
Remember to check out our other EcoBoost-related posts!
