For You Are Dust: Returning the Ford Bronco Raptor to the Mint 400
Primm, Nevada, is a sad place. The roller coaster at Buffalo Bill’s Casino hasn’t run in years. The outlet mall is shuttered. The best restaurant in town? It’s a battle between Denny’s and IHOP inside casinos on either side of I-15. But there is one overwhelmingly great thing about Primm: the Mint 400.
This story originally appeared in Volume 17 of Road & Track.
And Ford’s new Bronco Raptor is the Mint 400 manifest as a consumer product.
The Mint is more than an off-road race. It died once but was resurrected. It has outlived the downtown Las Vegas hotel after which it’s named, survived the scorn of environmentalists, and leveraged the psychedelic attention of Hunter S. Thompson into enduring legend. It’s a mix of dust, sand, mud, endangered tortoises, high-octane racing fuel, and obscure IPAs. It’s a multiday carnival of communal camping, kids driving ATVs, trucker caps, and, inevitably, dogs wearing sunglasses.
California’s Bill Stroppe built the first racing Bronco to compete in the initial Mexican 1000 (now Baja 1000) run in the fall of 1967. Piloted by Ray Harvick and co-driven by Stroppe, it led most of the race before breaking. But the experience was enough for Stroppe to goad and tease his friend Parnelli Jones to take on off-road racing. So Stroppe built another production-based Bronco for Jones and him to take on the first Mint 400 in 1968.
“I enjoyed the Baja races as much as any when it comes to having fun,” Parnelli Jones said in 2013. But it was the 1968 Mint 400 where he first competed in off-road racing. That Bronco was too fragile for Jones’s balls-out driving style. Hitting a wash at speed, the production-based Bronco disintegrated. “I cauliflowered the rims,” he recalled to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2014. “They had to take a torch to it.”
Until that first Mint, the Bronco had been an agricultural implement for farmers needing to get through muck or folks seeking obscure fishing spots. It was a niche market, and Ford barely made 14,000 of the cars in 1967. But on big wheels and tires, with the fearless Parnelli behind the wheel, the racing Bronco became a legend.
The new Bronco Raptor shamelessly exploits the image established by Stroppe and Jones and their racing Broncos. Riding atop 37-inch-tall, 12.5-inch-wide BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/A KO2 tires, swollen by fender flares that push overall width to 85.7 inches (5.7 inches wider than an F-250 Super Duty pickup), and with a face that practically snarls, it has an astonishing presence.
Each Mint 400 starts with a blocks-long party on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. This year almost 500 race teams competing in more than 50 classes lined up along Fremont, where anyone could wander amid the Bugs, buggies, UTVs, and trophy trucks as they meandered slowly toward tech inspection.
The Bronco Raptor was royalty along Fremont. Here it had as much cachet as a Ferrari SF90 at Monte Carlo. And if there had been an SF90 around, the crowd would have been rooting for the “Braptor” to drive over it.
Back in 1966, when Ford introduced the Bronco, it listed the lightest version at 2750 pounds and the heaviest at 3025 pounds. The Braptor crunches the scales at a staggering 5764 pounds. That’s 11 pounds shy of those two ’66 Broncos put together.
And as with the earliest ’66s, Ford doesn’t put a V-8 in any current street-legal Bronco. Instead, the Braptor relies on a 3.0-liter version of Ford’s EcoBoost twin-turbocharged V-6 rated at 418 hp at 5750 rpm and 440 lb-ft of peak torque at 2750 rpm. Alas, the 450-hp 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6 used in the F-150 Raptor hasn’t made it to its Bronco brother. Maybe Ford is holding that back for the inevitable Bronco Raptor R that’s likely to appear someday.
Getting into the Bronco Raptor takes an athletic leap or strong grip and a determined tug. The driver faces a 12-inch digital instrument cluster with another 12-inch screen atop the dash center. Some useful cameras pointing forward and rear helpfully display terrain during rock crawls, but there’s nothing digital here that matters too much.
What matters is how thoroughly Ford Performance has beefed up the Bronco’s structure, fortified many components, fitted super-trick shocks, and it all rides on the best all-around off-road tires ever fitted to a production four-by.
The boxed steel ladder frame gets Raptor-specific reinforced shock towers that allow greater suspension travel. Fitted to that strengthened foundation are new axles: a Dana 44 pumpkin in front with fortified half-shafts and a Dana 50 solid axle with an oversize 235-millimeter ring gear in back. Together they widen the track of the standard Bronco by more than eight inches. The driveshafts are thicker to handle the increased torque, and the transfer case has a 3.06:1 gear ratio in 4x4 low range for more effective crawling.
Fox Racing developed internal-bypass semi-active dampers, with the rear units having external reservoirs. Electronic position sensors allow on-the-fly shock adjustments for different terrains.
BFGoodrich has become Michelin’s American off-road tire brand. And the All-Terrain T/A KO2 tires fitted to the Braptor are the Pilot Sport Cup 2s of slop and rocks. At 37 inches tall on 17-inch wheels, there are 10 inches of sidewall to squish and conform around obstacles. Pack enough mud into the eccentric treads and they’ll lose traction, but it takes a concerted effort to accomplish that. Road & Track proudly boasts that that was achieved.
The KO2s are spectacular off-road, with a bite into dirt felt in the steering and confident braking no matter how slick or abrasive the surface. More impressive, they’re also astonishingly quiet on-road, with little tread or cavitation noise (like a basketball) over road divots, despite the large volume of air they contain. These are big balloons, yet the Bronco Raptor is quieter on-road than other Bronco trim levels running smaller tires.
Credit for the quiet also goes to some of Ford’s subtle engineering: the careful curve of the windshield, for instance, and the reinforced upper body structure that comes with Raptorization.
A bowl dug behind Buffalo Bill’s in Primm is where the Mint 400 starts and ends. Enough jumps within the bowl keep the crowd of nearly 65,000 entertained as the race machines launch on their four laps of the 95-mile course. There’s not a lot to see, but there is something to see. Primm dirt is sacred because of the people atop it; the Mint camaraderie has a physical presence.
At the northern end of the racecourse is the town of Jean. It makes Primm seem as cosmopolitan as, say, Trenton, and it’s home to a new Starbucks that charges $9.59 for a Venti Caramel Macchiato. After the race, I explored the course as it reverted to public trails and roads.
For nearly three tons propelled by a V-6, the Braptor is quick. It reaches 60 mph in 5.6 seconds and muscles its blocky self through the quarter-mile in 14.4 seconds at 94 mph. There’s virtually no character to the EcoBoost engine’s exhaust note, but the low-end torque production is easy to modulate precisely, and the 10-speed automatic transmission can, in the right drive mode, hold a gear even on nasty descents. There’s always an appetite for more power, but in off-roading, the character of the power matters more.
Whether flying across rutted fire lanes or tiptoeing across boulders, the Bronco Raptor resets the standards for production vehicles off-road. The compromises to achieve that include reduced rearward visibility, as the massive spare tire mounted to the tail intrudes into the backlight acreage. And the $77,015 as-tested chit is over twice the price of a base four-door Bronco.
Still, compared with the more capable versions of the Land Rover Defender or the Mercedes G-wagen, the Bronco Raptor represents high value. And the valets at the Bellagio in Vegas will park it up front with the Porsches and Lambos.
After a few discrete Braptor jumps in the Primm bowl the Sunday after the race, evidence that the 2023 Mint 400 ever took place was being bulldozed away. It would soon once again be a patch of land Californians ignore as they speed past it, eager to lose the kids’ college funds at Vegas slots. It’s not the land that is sacred in Primm but people in vehicles that make it precious. And the Bronco Raptor isn’t merely a great off-roader—it inspires and even sanctifies.
This is where Bronco earned its credibility. But there’s no guarantee the Mint 400 will be around forever. Terrible’s Casino in Jean has shut down. Harry Reid Airport in Las Vegas is strained to capacity, and there’s no room for it to grow. Rumors abound that the small general aviation airport near Jean could expand to deal with the cargo flights that are one of southern Nevada’s lifelines. If that expansion happens, a big chunk of the Mint 400 course could be lost.
The course may shorten, but the spirit of the Mint is unlikely to fade soon. The Fremont experience is too vivid, the parade of off-road beasts up the Strip and out to Primm is too much fun, and the race itself is intermittently mesmerizing. This isn’t something that will go away without a fight. Plus, it inspired the Bronco Raptor. That even makes Primm seem happy.
You Might Also Like
