The EcoBoost engine that powered this 2011 Ford F-150 through the Baja 1000 desert endurance race will be pubicly torn down this weekend.
Late last year, Ford built a desert-racing truck around its new 3.5-liter twin-turbocharged EcoBoost V-6 engine and took it to the grueling Baja 1000, the toughest race in North America, for its racing debut.
On Saturday morning, in front of 500 or so witnesses, Ford mechanics and engineers will tear down the sealed race engine to its smallest component parts to check for any significant wear after the 1000-mile torture test.
The engine, which had run the equivalent of 160,000 customer miles, or 10 years of constant use, already, in dynamometer testing, was installed in a Ford F-150 pickup truck at the Ford Kansas City assembly plant. The truck then hauled 55 tons of lumber and ran at full throttle for 24 hours straight while towing 11,300 pounds of cargo.
If that wasn’t grueling enough, the truck was then prepped for the SCORE Tecate Baja 1000 event in Mexico, and completed the race without incident.
The same engine was plucked from the truck, shipped to the Ford engine labs in Dearborn, and was then retested on the dynamometer, where it made its advertised 36 horsepower and 420 foot-pounds of torque, and showed no loss of compression and no leaks of oil or coolant.
Jim Mazuchowski, V-6 engine program manager at Ford said of the public teardown, “Customers will be able to see for themselves how the components fared during a regime of tests that, taken together, are far more extreme than even the harshest-use customer could dish out. This EcoBoost engine received no special treatment, and now we’re going to see how it did.”
The piece-by-piece teardown and inspection will be performed on Saturday morning at 11 AM on the truck portion of the 71,000 square-foot Ford stand at Cobo Hall during the first day of public attendance at the North American International Auto Show, and is free to interested show attendees.
Ford has built engines from scratch at auto shows previously, but has never torn down a used engine in public before.