Ford F-150 Clips Jeep Trackhawk’s Wings at the Strip
A humble Jeep owner tells how his Trackhawk couldn’t fly down the strip as quickly as his pal’s supercharged 2018 Ford F-150.
A lot of mechanical know-how and engineering goes into drag racing, but the end results of a run are pretty simple. There’s a winner and a loser. It’s perfectly normal for the victor to want to talk about how they beat their opponent on the strip. You usually don’t see videos from the person who came in 2nd place going on about how much faster their rival’s car was. But that’s just the kind of video you’re going to see above, courtesy of the YouTube channel EastCoastJeepSRT.
Channel host Ron Findlay has a 2018 Jeep Trackhawk, the Hellcat-powered pinnacle of the company’s Grand Cherokee lineup. With 707 horsepower and all-wheel drive, it’s a monster of a people-mover. But it wasn’t strong enough for Findlay. He modified his Trackhawk to produce 800 horsepower – at the wheels. That means he’s basically putting the crank horsepower of a Challenger Hellcat Redeye to the ground. But it wasn’t enough to beat a certain Ford F-150 at the Cecil County Dragway in Rising Sun, Maryland.
Findlay doesn’t start off his recap of his ill-fated drag races against his pal Dorian and his supercharged F-150 by talking trash or making excuses. He tells it like it is. “You’re about to see…my 800-wheel-horsepower Trackhawk have its ass drug down the track.”
You’ve got to respect that modesty. And Dorian’s truck. It’s a two-door, short-bed 2018 F-150 4X4 with the 5.0-liter V8 under the hood and plenty of mods. According to a video on Dorian’s appropriately named channel, Boosted F-150, those include a 2.9-liter Whipple supercharger, a pulley mod, a tune, and the ability to run on E50 fuel. All of those upgrades add up to an estimated 950 wheel horsepower.
Technically, Dorian gets disqualified just before the first run starts because he jumps the gun and gets hit with a red light penalty (starting off before getting the green “go” light). Violation or not, he pulls a strong quarter mile time: 10.385 seconds versus Findlay’s 10.777.
The Trackhawk and F-150 launch at the right times at the beginning of the second run. Both V8 beasts tear down the strip, but the Ford crosses the line first. It’s fast and consistent, running the 1,320-foot dash in 10.363 seconds. Findlay is just as steady, pulling a time of 10.713 seconds.
Back in his Jeep, Findlay bluntly sums up the action. “That’s a Ford F-150 pickup truck dragging the shit out of me down the track.” (We’re sure he’s not the first person to say that exact sentence and we know he won’t be the last.) As if we weren’t already convinced he was a good sport, Findlay says, “Good racing, great guy” about his friend Dorian. We have a feeling Dorian would say the same about him.
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