Can You Rally a Massive Ford F-450? The Answer Is Yes, Absolutely
It may be slower than a minivan around a gravel course, but there’s no denying the style of the Super Duty Slide.
The Ford Super Duty is many things—powerful, practical, and yeah, enormous. All that is especially true of the F-450 King Ranch, which carries all the luxuries of a cowboy's oh-so-humble abode on six wheels and tires. The truck's 6.7-liter Power Stroke diesel makes 475 horsepower and 1,050 lb-ft of torque, which is obviously more than enough, and it's even equipped with four-wheel-drive. Still, I wouldn't call it a rally car.
That didn't stop Wyatt Knox at Team O'Neil from sending one of these 8,000-pound hosses around a tight, twisty gravel track. All it took was a little courage and some computer trickery in the form of pulling three ABS fuses. Everything was butter from there, so long as the truck stayed in two-wheel drive.
Knox performed a pretty thorough shakedown of the pickup before taking it on a timed run. It's great at drifting, as it turns out, and thanks to that walloping torque you can actually control it fairly easily. The 10-speed transmission complicates things a bit, but third gear is the best for pulling wicked skids, in case you were curious. Just make sure you give the truck plenty of space to do its thing since all that momentum is moving an object that's 22 feet long.
Team O'Neil's course has hosted plenty of unorthodox rally rigs in the past. There was the second-gen Toyota Tacoma that was surprisingly quick, as well as a Ford Crown Vic P71 that beat a Dodge Charger and a... Kia Sedona. Again, all kinds find their way onto the gravel.
While the Super Duty wasn't the fastest—indeed, it was the slowest—it was still surprisingly capable. Maneuvering it through the sweepers was a breeze and Knox hit straight-line speeds of 70 mph near the end. He had to be methodical in his approach to the most technical corners, mainly because there was no going back if the brakes locked up. "When in doubt, throttle out" was certainly a helpful tactic when exiting those turns.
The Ford managed a time of 2:11.78, a full four seconds behind the aforementioned Sedona minivan. But! It did so with tons of style and honestly, and what more could you ask of a workhorse? Its dual rear wheels made it a lot more stable than, say, an F-250. Who cares if the tires were totally cooked afterward?
If you own one of these machines, I won't tell you to disable the safety tech and go for a skid. But it's nice to know you could, if you needed to.
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