Tech Breakdown: Here’s What Makes the Ford Performance F-150 Lightning Super Truck So Super

Things are happening at the Ford Performance Center in Concord, North Carolina. You might have heard of the Performance Center mostly for its involvement with NASCAR, but if you aren’t familiar with the roundy-round cars, you probably don’t know how sophisticated the sport really is. Ford Performance makes a concerted effort to leverage the tools it invested in NASCAR to push new boundaries in racing divisions like the FIA World Rally Championship and street cars alike. The effort is spawning outrageous technology demonstrators like the F-150 Lightning Super Truck.

Names like Tesla’s Cybertruck sure sound cool, but the F-150 Lightning Super Truck comes straight from cyberspace. Without building a single prototype, the Super Truck has already earned its “super” designation with a record-breaking qualifying run at the 102nd Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in June that it turned into an overall win. It has performance metrics that in some ways rival Formula 1 cars, and its development started less than a year ago.

New Digs

The Ford Performance Center opened in 2014 as little more than a warehouse with one vehicle simulator to support NASCAR. It can be thought of as a sophisticated video game, but there’s loads more to it than that, and it won’t fit inside your average man cave. Ten years later, the building now houses three vehicle simulators, a scale-model shop, and engineering teams dedicated to modeling aerodynamics (computational fluid dynamics, or CFD) and suspension development, working in conjunction with resources at Ford’s main headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.

Here is some perspective on how valuable these tools are: The legendary Ford GT40 needed three years of development and 12 protypes before it found success on the racetrack. (Remember that in the 1960s, unlike today, no one carried more computing power in their pocket than was on board Apollo 11.) The F-150 Lightning Super Truck was commissioned in October of 2023 and was completely designed by February 2024, including parsing through 80,000 different suspension hard points (yes, 80,000). It had wheels on the ground by May 14 of the same year and won the PPIHC less than six weeks later. If that isn’t super, what is?

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Super Specs

Ford’s F-150 Lightning Super Truck is successful because of the artful integration of a limit-pushing powertrain from STARD (Stohl Advanced Research and Development) based in Austria, a Ford Performance–designed vehicle architecture to get the power to the ground, and an unnamed state-of-the-art carbon-fiber manufacturing partner (also from Austria, but that’s all Ford will reveal) to make the aerodynamic components designed by Ford strong enough to withstand the extreme forces the Super Truck can generate.

And when we say extreme, we mean it. But before we dive into the details, remember: This is a truck. It might not share much with a production F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck except for a similar wheelbase, but it creates additional engineering challenges, and that’s the challenge Ford wanted. It was always going to be bigger, heavier, and more difficult to make it do what it does than a typical car would have been. Despite the obvious challenges, the product is a thing that at least dimensionally looks like a truck and can generate 6,000 pounds of downforce at 150 mph and 10,000 pounds at 200 mph. Those are well beyond F1-level forces for anyone keeping track.

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The Motors

As prepped for its Pikes Peak run, the Ford F-150 Lightning Super Truck had one motor in the front and two powering the rear. Each motor is a 375-killowatt six-phase STARD motor, with individual insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) inverters for each phase. In terms most gearheads understand better, that’s more than 500 hp with 310 lb-ft of torque each. Ford estimates total system output is around 1,600 hp. Torque at the front axle can range from 885 to 2,213 lb-ft and the rear from 2,950 to 5,900 lb-ft at the wheels depending on gearing. Adjustments to power output, energy recuperation under braking, and power distribution between axles can be adjusted to the tune of 1000 Hz, where a typical F1 combustion engine can only make timing and fuel adjustments at rates of 20 Hz.

There is a lot of secret sauce in the motors, but only figuratively, because they are externally cooled with water instead of internally cooled with oil. Maximum motor speed is 16,000 rpm.

The rear axle combines both motors with one input shaft to a limited-slip differential. Why not power each wheel individually? The LSD can send torque from both motors to one wheel if needed, where one motor at each wheel would only have half of the comparable torque. The system output is also more versatile the way STARD designed it, with the same setup up front.

In the equivalent of Super Saiyan mode, a fourth motor can be added to the front axle for an eye-watering maximum output of more than 2,000 hp. Six-phase motors were chosen because of their power density, and that kind of power from four 77-pound motors says it all. To put it another way, a Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 has 1,025 hp, but the V-8 weighs about 900 pounds.

As tough as the Pikes Peak “race to the clouds” can be, three motors were all the F-150 Lightning Super Truck needed based on Ford simulations to calculate the quickest times based on possible speed and downforce in different sections of the mountain. In this case, Ford determined the extra motor would just run the battery down quicker. But on a more open track? Ford says there is more coming, but we want to see all four motors in action as soon as we can.

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The Battery

The motors aren’t internally cooled, but the 50-kilowatt battery is. STARD is equally tight lipped about the battery as it is regarding the motors, but we do know the pack is filled with a dielectric fluid (non-conductive) surrounding each cell to facilitate better cooling. And when a battery has an open-circuit voltage ranging from 800 to 907 volts and a 1,500-amp output supporting a maximum discharge rate of 1,500 kW, cooling is key. The regenerative braking system can recharge the battery at up to 600 kW, contributing to the heat equation.

Beyond that, the battery is composed of ultra high-performance Li-polymer NMC 811 cells, known for their high-power density. Each cell is monitored for voltage and temperature. This gives a much more accurate range estimation compared to consumer cars. The latter checks a few cells and calculates the rest, a lot like when the power company estimates your meter based on expected use with periodic physical readings to adjust the estimate.

Production vehicles come with onboard chargers, meaning they can convert AC grid power to the DC power the battery uses. The Ford F-150 Lightning Super Truck ditches it to save weight, and an external charger is connected to the battery, which then accepts a typical CCS charger. Because the battery undergoes so much thermal stress during a race, it isn’t charged with the higher rates available with DC charging.

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What About the Video Games?

The computing power behind the F-150 Lightning Super Truck is where things really get interesting. And as important as hiring Romain Dumas—the only driver to ever complete the PPIHC in less than eight minutes—was for the winning run, the ability for him to practice and fine-tune the setup before a physical truck existed is probably the biggest edge the team had going into race day.

Imagine the best sim-racing setups available, and then forget them. For the most realistic experience, Ford builds a buck identical to the vehicle being driven virtually. Ford gave us the opportunity to try out the simulator with a NEXTGEN NASCAR buck, and it was the real deal with a five-point harness, window net, quick-release steering wheel, and the same dashboard and gauges you’ll see on the in-car views during a televised race.

When production parts are available for consumer cars, they are used, and it takes about six months to mimic a production vehicle like the F-150 Raptor. When parts aren’t available, the next best thing is used. In the case of the Lightning Super Truck, the Raptor buck was recommissioned. Remember, Ford finished the design phase of the project in only five months.

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Sounds Like Video Games With a Fancy Cockpit

We keep saying “video games,” but what’s really going on in the simulator is digital modeling of actual road surfaces, tire physics, suspension physics, and just plain old physics to create virtual models that are as good as the real thing. (Well, at least as close as possible right now. As we discovered a few years ago, the driving feel isn’t always the most realistic, though that was on an older simulator.) The latest and greatest simulator has been in use for two years and has a 360-degree screen and enough displacement in the real world to simulate a Raptor going airborne. The sensations are impressively realistic, right down to the active seatbelt that progressively tightens to simulate braking force.

We took a run on the newest simulator, the same one used for the Super Truck’s development. Ford set us up on Pikes Peak with a 500-hp Mustang Mach-E and a 700-hp version. The screen is outside the vehicle buck, and with an unlimited viewing area, you’re free to turn your head and look to anticipate turns anywhere you think your eyes need to be. Since your eyes aren’t stuck inside VR goggles, your peripheral vision still catches what’s coming in the outskirts of your view. The feedback in the steering wheel doesn’t initiate motion but feels like it’s reacting to the road, which isn’t quite like real life. Jumping into the 700-hp Mach-E, one thing that was immediately noticeable was the ability to break traction with similar pedal application as in real life. And you feel it about as instantly as you would in reality as the simulator begins to twist.

As far as being used as a real tool, everything in the simulation is tunable. Actual suspension dampers can be put on a dyno, and those curves can be programmed to test different rates at each wheel corner. Aero elements can be adjusted, weather can be programmed, and tire pressures can be changed, of course. Think of a variable, and engineers can manipulate it. When testing for NASCAR, tires with different levels of wear can be tried without wasting time in the pits or precious real rubber. Tires can be kept constant while other aspects of the car change. The opportunity to change one variable without changing anything else is impossible in reality, but the lessons learned in virtual testing are often easily applied when the time comes.

It’s basically the Matrix in almost every sense: You walk into a bright white dome, you have radio communication with someone on the outside, then you strap in, the lights go dark, and suddenly you’re blasting 700 hp up a sketchy mountain. Or in Dumas’ case, twice that power. The simulation is accurate enough that Dumas could give feedback to engineers based on feeling the vehicle the way he would in real life. The team fine-tuned the simulation so well that it was nearly spot on with the time Ford expected to lay down on the actual run. The only reason the F-150 Lightning Super Truck didn’t beat the previous year’s result from Ford’s Super Van 4.2 was a slight malfunction at the beginning of the race. You can prep for anything, but on race day, you never know what the mountain might give you. Just ask our Johnny Leiberman.

Why Doesn’t Everyone Use Simulators?

Ford, as you probably know, isn’t the only car manufacturer using simulation tools this complex. Yet while these tools are becoming more common, they are still extremely cost-prohibitive and mostly stay in the racing world. As Ford Performance engineers explained, the benefit of the investment is more immediate in racing: The Ford F-150 Lightning Super Truck began proving its worth in less than a year. Throughout a season, drivers can hone their cars and skills and improve week by week. For consumer cars, it could be years before enough of a particular model sells enough units to pay back the investment. But keep in mind just how much money and time is saved up front.

In my previous life doing simulated-durability testing, we had the same tools at our disposal. Customers—mostly EV startups—would often inquire about creating models to test virtually, when the conventional real-world process required collecting obscene amounts of data with a working prototype at a proving ground. That would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to begin with, and then hundreds of thousands more to run a six-week or longer test. That means the vehicle, if it survives, is also unavailable for other development teams.

But in the digital space, vehicle models already exist because everything is designed in CAD with some level of physics modelling. The next step is improving the virtual roads, creating more accurate tire models, and even better software. The cost for software licensing and precision road scanning turned most bean counters away, unable to realize the benefits of virtually developing a vehicle with no physical prototype, and then going for broke once you have the answer. That’s what Ford did here, and the F-150 Lightning Super Truck EV demonstrator speaks for itself.

If the world wants cheaper cars, they need to be cheaper to produce. That’s an easy solution: more virtual testing. In other words: Measure twice, cut once.