Ford brought its most capable off-road racer home last week, and it immediately reminded the American desert what it had been missing. Mitch Guthrie Jr. and co-driver Kellon Walch put the Ford Raptor T1+ on the overall podium at the 2026 Casey Folks Vegas to Reno, finishing second across more than 500 miles of Nevada desert in 7 hours and 43 minutes. It was the truck’s first race on American soil and its first competition anywhere outside international rally raid.
The result carries more weight given the conditions under which it was achieved. Ford Racing entered the Raptor T1+ in full FIA Dakar specification, meaning the truck competed against purpose-built American desert race vehicles with every regulatory limitation the Dakar Rally imposes still in place. The team made no concessions to the American format. The objective was to put the truck into a sustained, high-load environment ahead of the next Dakar, and to find out how a global rally-raid weapon would perform against machines engineered specifically for the Nevada desert. The answer was a podium.
The Raptor T1+ is a purpose-built machine developed by Ford Racing and M-Sport for multi-stage rally-raid events where competitors routinely cover thousands of kilometers across some of the most punishing terrain on earth. Its foundation is a custom steel spaceframe chassis carrying a Coyote-based 5.0-liter V8, paired with long-travel FOX suspension tuned for events where a single stage can last all day. The program came into 2026 with second and third-place finishes at the Dakar Rally already in the books.
Vegas to Reno compressed roughly 800 kilometers of competition into a single day, roughly twice the distance the team would typically log in one Dakar stage. For M-Sport program manager Matthew Wilson, that density was the most valuable thing about the weekend. “To get that without any issues other than a puncture has been the biggest positive out of the whole thing,” Wilson said at the finish. The mechanical zero carries forward directly to Dakar preparation.
For Guthrie, the race closed a loop. He spent a decade competing in U.S. desert racing, including multiple appearances at Vegas to Reno, before moving onto the international rally-raid circuit and joining Ford’s Raptor T1+ program. Standing at the finish line in Nevada with the truck that has been his world on the global stage brought the two chapters of his career together for the first time. “I know this truck is fast and super reliable, and I think today we showed everyone what we can do,” Guthrie said. “And this is just the start.”
Walch, a Nevada native, described the result plainly: “It was honestly a dream come true for me to race this truck here in my backyard.” The pair completed the race with no mechanical issues beyond a puncture, a clean sheet that matters as much as the podium position when the program’s primary target remains January’s Dakar.
Ford Racing Global Director Mark Rushbrook connected the weekend to the broader 2026 calendar, noting the 125th anniversary of Henry Ford’s 1901 racing victory that helped launch the company, alongside the United States’ 250th anniversary. The patriotic framing was deliberate. An American driver, an American co-driver, and one of Ford Racing’s most globally developed vehicles, all back in the Nevada desert where the Raptor’s high-performance off-road identity was built over years of desert use.
The Raptor T1+ leaves Nevada unbeaten mechanically and with one more podium on its record. Whether that translates to a Dakar front-row fight in January is the question the 800 kilometers were designed to help answer.
Source: Ford. Images courtesy of Ford.
