Off-road in the Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally: can we beat Google Maps to Pikes Peak?

“Don’t drive over the pointy ones,” announces Olgun, using the voice of a man who fears being stranded. Possibly not unreasonably, and I can’t tell whether he’s being sarcastic. But he’s right. We’ve been not driving over ‘the pointy ones’ for a couple of hours, and the trail is not getting easier. We have averaged 2mph. Sigh.

Photography: Olgun Kordal

Bluntly, the entire trip has fallen apart in the first three hours. Meticulous planning. Incessant use of Google’s aerial imagery. A road book cobbled together from a weighty stack of printouts. All kaput. The idea was simple – beat the time set by Google Maps on a set route, via the simple expedient of taking rally style, off-road shortcuts. Do so in Colorado – itself littered with graded dirt roads and off-road trails – using a car fit for the mini expedition. Something fast, all-wheel drive, rugged and... electric. OK, so the last one wasn’t a given, but the limited run Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally fits the bill.

There’s the requisite 480bhp and 700lb ft of torque of the standard GT, but here we have bash plates under suspension lifted an inch, tweaks to the bushings, anti-roll bars and adaptive magnetorheological dampers. A rear spoiler that looks like it’s been robbed from the back of a Focus RS, proper rally style wheels and cross-climate tyres. It also has graphics, which we all know to be scientifically proven to be worth 10bhp. All of which are, currently, as useful as teeth made of cheese.

The route was to take in the centre of Boulder just outside Denver as the start point, out to Ward past Burnt Mountain and Gold Hill, backtrack to the top of Mount Blue Sky – the highest paved road in North America – hit Will-O-The-Wisp and Deckers and then a shot to Pikes Peak. Google Maps won’t map all the way to the top of Mount Blue Sky, so there was some squish, and we had to be respectful, so there were rest breaks. But Google reckoned about eight hours, give or take, including charging – which both routes would require. And yet one – and yes it was the first – shortcut, and we’ve managed to basically break the whole idea on the back of a view. And yet what a view.

We’re on the Switzerland Trail near Sugarloaf Mountain, and despite the feeling of resignation in the car, it is beautiful. Razored spines of mountains breaching the horizon like the loops of some massive sea creature, pine forests cut with dusty trails stitched through the lot. It’s hot, and breathy; Denver itself is known as the ‘Mile High City’ and we’re further up than that, so you’ll find yourself panting or yawning as your body searches for extra oxygen.

The Mach-E trundles on though, presenting us with new wonders at every literal turn. I get the car bogged in sand on a particularly tricky uphill, spin the wheels a bit too much and dig too far. Recovery is easy, but nothing bodes well. I thought the Switzerland Trail might be a good warmup for cheeky shortcuts to come, but it turns out we probably needed something with a bit more suspension and a lot more sidewall to attempt this at more than walking pace. There are, according to my calculations, another 22 miles to go on this part alone, and we’re already stuffed.

After four hours of medium strength rocks, we eventually make it back to a dirt road, and head on up to Ward, to come up with a new plan. Which involves trying to get to our waypoints using as little freeway as possible. Which therefore involves taking every interesting road we see, making for a rather brilliant roadtrip, if a massively inefficient one. So it’s down to Mount Blue Sky across several of Colorado’s dirt trails, and up. And up. Some 28 miles and 7,000ft of elevation to the top at 14,130ft, with a view of the continental divide.

The bottom bit is incredible, sparkled with boulder strewn waterfalls and cold, clear lakes. The middle is Swiss Alpine scenes on steroids, complete with oversized deer, the top proper mountain complete with butch looking mountain goats and loudmouthed marmots. It’s the highest paved road in North America by a toppled rock, and – as a very general rule – a nat-asp engine would lose roughly three per cent of its power every 1,000ft of elevation gain. If the Mach-E had an engine, at the top of Mount Blue sky, it’d be making 278bhp from 480. But it hasn’t got an engine, and isn’t reliant on the weight of the sky pushing itself into cylinders. So we’re as nimble at the top as we were at the bottom.

It’s fun, too. Even though the Mach-E carries a decent chunk of weight, it rides over broken surfaces better than it has any right to. Hairpins need a bit of caution on the brakes and when you turn in – too much speed and you’ll wash the front pretty easily – but once you have the hang of getting it turned and then simply applying as much power as you can handle, you can confidently dissect pretty much anything. But electric has drawbacks: we’ve murdered our range getting up the hill, and things look sketchy getting back to our allotted charging point. Fortunately, it’s all – literally – downhill from here. And lightly dragging the Mach-E’s brakes into regen on the way down magics up another 12 per cent of range. Still, back to Idaho Springs and a break, plus some charging – which is just as hit ’n’ miss in the USA as Europe, unfortunately.

What follows is one of the most random trips I’ve been on for a while. A vague southerly direction, main roads stitched together by whatever interesting side road took our fancy – and that included more of the random off-road crawling and what amounted to B-roads coated with nothing but gravel. Small towns, strange sights and roadside USA, the bits that get cut away by freeway travel, the places in the eddies of America’s backwaters. There are old trucks parked by the side of the road, bruised and battered and steeped in stories. Weird little art galleries and cabins and houses and trailers tucked into the woods. The scale is terrific, the joy endless.

And then we get to the best bit: Rampart Range Road of the 67 west of Sedalia. Some 50+ miles of gravel road. This was supposed to be my ace in the hole – but we’re so far behind the satnav time, it’s just for fun now. But what fun. Because the Mach-E Rally was built for exactly this. A few mode changes, a morph in driving style and suddenly everything makes sense. You can’t go full Loeb – these are still public roads – but on the sighted bits, the Mach-E Rally starts to act like the world’s pudgiest WRC car. Brake, flick, wait, turn back the other way and power. Trust the process, feel the surface.

The Rally likes to kick up dust, rotate the rear on corner exit with the front pulling hard after that, gravel pinging in the arches and along the underbelly like distant machine gun fire. And this lasts for hours. Through giant cliffs and monolithic standing stones, gulches and rock gardens, burned forests and sandy washes. We get a slow puncture somewhere along the line, and stop every couple of hours to pump it back up, but life is good.

Brake, flick, wait, turn back the other way and power. Trust the process, feel the surface

Eventually, we pop out somewhere near Woodland Falls, and take a run up Pikes Peak itself. Home of the world famous hillclimb, which just happens to be... tomorrow. It’s another high one, stripped of its foliage as it climbs, littered with fast sweepers that tighten into precarious bends where all you can see is a vague vector and sky. It’s hard to appreciate without actually driving it, but when you do, you have a healthy respect for those that take it flat out – the lack of guardrails and heavy presence of 500ft drops is no joke. The Mach-E’s traction control button remains unpressed on the upper reaches, and it’s still a bit heart pounding – but that’s the altitude. Probably. We wend down to a hotel in Colorado Springs and prepare to get up at 1am. But this has been a joyous, random trip.

And there’s been a lesson. To be blunt, given the nature of even paved roads around the world, the Rally is probably the kind of car we all need. Smaller wheels, chonkier tyres, a bit more pillow to the ride and shockproof underbody. Cruising around on freeways with the horsepower stabled in ‘Whisper’ mode, it’s better riding, more comfy and generally better than the GT, which can ride like it has suspension made of exotic hardwood. There is, however, that button to turn the traction control off. And a mode to unlock all of the horsepower. And on some of the graded and gravelled backroads of Colorado, suddenly, the Rally turns into the best car ever invented.

OK, so that may be an overstatement, but my word when it’s in its element, is the Rally fun. We’ll be back tomorrow at Pikes, for another electric Ford. But that one’s a little bit more serious. 

King of the hill?

It’s 3am, and I have drooled on the Mach-E’s door card. We left a couple of hours ago to get to the startline of the 2024 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, and with nothing better to do until dawn, grabbed some kip in the car. The rear tyre is flat again, but that doesn’t matter, because we’re here, we made it, and something is brewing about 50 metres up the hill. And it is epic.

This is the Ford F-150 SuperTruck. Not so much a Lightning as an entire electrical storm. Three six-phase motors and lithium-polymer NMC batteries developed by Austrian R&D outfit STARD, all-wheel drive, aerodynamics from the spaceship school of design. There’s precisely no F-150 in there apart from the vague shape and some badges, the chassis and carbon bodywork all made to spec. And it’s less bulky than it looks – the SuperTruck weighs 1,600kg and sports 1,600bhp, and that insane looking set of aerodynamic aids produces 2,722kg of downforce at 150mph.

So yes, if you inverted the world, this thing could drive on a mythical ceiling. The team is here to dominate, and practice has been fruitful – the Ford team has been breaking the back of Pikes in the hands of Romain Dumas – a PP hillclimb veteran and current overall record holder with the Volkswagen ID.R. He’s been competing here for the best part of a decade, so he’s a solid choice.

Although even Dumas hasn’t actually got all that much Pikes Peak experience. No one has. While practice is allowed on the mountain, it’s done in three sections – if it’s not limited by inclement weather – which means that the only time competitors run the full course is on race day. Dumas might have been here nine times, but that means his full course race time experience is probably only around the 90-minute mark.

Still, he’s got Ford form in the Open Class – he set records with the Ford Performance SuperVan 4.2 in 2023, and the team has been comfortably faster with the Lightning this year on the chopped up sections. The weather has been changeable, but it looks good for the race, and there’s a lot of expectation. It’s been 10 months of prep for this eight-something minutes of fury.

We wait for the Ford run, and discover that Pikes Peak, as it turns out, is utterly bonkers and absolutely wonderful. Different classes, wildly different machinery, all sorts of homebrew efforts and marginal aero design seeking to make the most of the thin air. You don’t race each other up here, you race the mountain, and that kind of slow camaraderie is an absolute joy. Hyundai pitches out first with some Ioniq 5 N derivatives, electric not suffering from altitude sickness, and there are Porsches and open wheelers and a bloke from Bishop’s Stortford in a Dax Rush. TG’s own Rob Dahm is taking a trip up in his 1,000bhp homebuilt RX-7, and there’s a palpable sense of excitement and wonder. It’s wonderful.

Soon enough though, Dumas is strapped in, and ready. There have been stop start moments as cars break or lightly crash, but Dumas is focused, calm. This is where he earns his money, and you find the difference, the one per cent that elevates him from a good driver to a great one. We jog behind the car to the start line, and watch as it fires off up the hill, sirens blaring. It has to make a noise. It sounds like an ambulance, and yet it leaves like a liveried bullet.

Everyone rushes back to the monitors to witness the victory, but by the time we get back, the SuperTruck is slowing, coming to a complete stop. No one knows what’s happening – whether red flag or failure. Comms explode, the team starts frantically battering at computers, trying to figure out what’s going on. But whatever has broken, it’s absolutely destroyed the run. The race is, to all intents and purposes, finished. It’s over. But nobody told Dumas.

What happens next would be rejected as a movie script for being too unbelievable. After spending eight seconds failing to progress, and a further 18 seconds stopped dead, Dumas has completed what was described by the team as ‘The IT Crowd solution’. He’s basically switched the F-150 off and back on again, and rebooted. But this isn’t a quick flick of a switch, and the cycling of all the safety critical systems takes time. But once he gets it going again, Dumas simply throws caution to the wind and lets the SuperTruck eat. What results is incredible.

The team just stares at the monitors, open mouthed. It’s a masterclass in control and risk management

Dumas chews chunks out of the previous fastest time in every sector, perilously fast, absolutely committed. The team just stares at the monitors, open mouthed. It’s a masterclass in control and risk management, but the overall impression is that the SuperTruck is just so very, very fast. Dumas crosses the finish line in eight minutes and 53 seconds. King of the Hill, winner of the event, but six-odd seconds slower than the SuperVan from last year. Without the stop, it would have eviscerated the record.

The team is subdued. The SuperTruck has emerged victorious, but they wanted the smackdown, the full house. To me though, this is the point of racing, and the joy. It all seemed hopeless, broken, and yet Dumas had the presence of mind to keep going, keep trying, and when he did, the SuperTruck came through. A boxer getting knocked down in the first round, only to come back swinging and win. Victory through perseverance and grit. A win against the odds.

And that’s the point. The F-150 Lightning SuperTruck is joyously insane, but this is more than just a PR exercise. It’s about pushing the envelope, seeing what’s possible, and yes, breaking stuff just to see what snaps. This isn’t about direct trickledown to road cars, but in racing, you get to see what works under pressure and what doesn’t, destruct test mathematical models in the chaos of real life. And that’s what gets passed down in terms of experience and knowledge, finessed into a car that you or I might drive.

The SuperTruck may have experienced a failure, but that in itself has provided valuable data – literally learning by doing. Ford is doing that learning in public, rather than closeted in a lab, and that’s way more exciting for those of us watching. The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is a bit like the Isle of Man TT: one of the last great, insane races, which you feel might get safer as time goes on, risk blunted by well meaning regulation. But for now, it’s still got that wonder. And the SuperTruck still has a record to beat.