The Design Tools Ford Used to Win at Pikes Peak

Ford's 2,000-horsepower, all-electric F-150 Lightning SuperTruck looks little like its namesake pickup. With a giant wing hanging off the back, it clearly wasn't meant for hauling lumber. 

The SuperTruck was designed to carry just one thing: ace pilot Romain Dumas on a quest to win the 2024 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The annual Race to the Clouds doesn't have much in the way of rules and regulations compared to something like Formula One or NASCAR, giving designers freedom to go wild. 

The SuperTruck is indeed wild, borne of an idea at Ford's headquarters in Dearborn, MI, but manufactured 4,500 miles to the east at STARD, an Austrian race car builder. Ford and STARD had just nine months to design and manufacture the SuperTruck, a feat made possible by technologies like telepresence, augmented reality, driver simulation, and a suite of modeling and rendering tools.

The all-electric F-150 Lightning SuperTruck. TIM STEVENS

Initial concepts for the F-150 Lightning SuperTruck

If the SuperTruck looks to you like something that escaped from a video game, that's because, in a way, it did. "My early childhood connection with cars probably came from Gran Turismo One and Two," said Anthony Meyer, design manager of the SuperTruck. "There was that Suzuki that had the monster wing way on the back."

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It was called the Escudo, a dual-engined monster that tackled Pikes Peak in the mid-'90s. When the team at Polyphony Digital added it to the first Gran Turismo, it was the hottest car in the game, notorious for its big power and bigger wing.

That was a feature Ford's team working in Michigan knew the SuperTruck needed. The team iterated through numerous two-dimensional sketches, but they all had the same, aggressively aerodynamic shape to tackle the unique challenge of Pikes Peak.

"The reason we have to make that much downforce is because the air thins by 35 percent at the top of the peak," said David Root, exterior designer of the F-150 Lightning SuperTruck. At sea level, the SuperTruck can generate a massive 6,000 pounds of downforce. But, at the top of the 14,000-foot Pikes Peak, that figure drops to a relatively paltry 3,900. 

In order to know just how much downforce the SuperTruck would generate, Root and the team would have to bring those two-dimensional concepts into the third dimension.

Adding depth

To build out the designs into something more tangible, the team started with a collaborative design tool called Gravity Sketch to get a feel for roughly how things looked and fit together in 3D. "You can sit there one-to-one and make sure that Romain will be able to see up the mountain at this angle or that angle," Meyer said. 

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When it came time to get serious, the team relied on Blender. "It's a modeling and visualization software all in one, and it just makes things extremely efficient for me," Root said.

Autodesk's Maya was also used for "a bit of refinement" of the design, but Blender's ability to both visualize and generate models for testing made it a key tool for the SuperTruck's development process. This included running computational fluid dynamics early in the design process.

"Within days of program start, I was sending services to our aero team, and we were getting feedback, which is unheard of," Root said. "We typically use a NURBS-based software to model for that, and that takes weeks if not months."

A rear view of the SuperTruck. TIM STEVENS

Melding realities

When I first saw the SuperTruck in the flesh, sitting in a studio at Ford's Experience Center in Dearborn, MI, I wasn't the only one getting a first look. Meyer, the design manager, had never seen it either. His work had been done entirely virtually up until that point. 

I got a taste of his former perspective when I was greeted with not one SuperTruck but two of the bewinged things. To the right was the truck that had run up the hill in Colorado. Sitting just to its left was another SuperTruck, visually identical except for being immaculately clean and, weirdly, even sharper looking than the one on the right. This SuperTruck was a virtual creation, a rendering of the model that Meyer and team had developed.

Related:EV Sets Record at Pikes Peak Hill Climb

Augmented reality enables viewing the real SuperTruck next to the virtual one in a real space. TIM STEVENS

I was admiring the two through a set of Varjo XR-3 mixed-reality glasses, capable of providing a resolution of 1920 x 1920 per eye. Those high-resolution displays, combined with equally high-definition cameras, meant Ford's design team could drop a one-to-one model of the SuperTruck into their space and walk around it. 

"It was really critical making us feel comfortable with what we were putting out there and what we were signing checks for," Meyer said. 

Ford uses a variety of headsets and technologies, including consumer-grade Meta Quest Pro units for quick visualizations. But when the team needs to take a more serious look, they break out the XR-3s, powered by heavyweight PCs running dual graphics cards. 

With a touch of the button, you can strip the skin off the virtual SuperTruck and get a look at the structures beneath. TIM STEVENS

Other simulations

There's one final key aspect to the whole project that needed to be verified before STARD could begin production of the physical SuperTruck: They needed to make sure it could perform. 

While the team was still refining the truck's model, driver Dumas was virtually hustling digital prototypes up Pikes Peak at Ford's driver-in-the-loop simulator in North Carolina. 

Dumas would give feedback about the prototype truck's core handling characteristics, and exterior designer Root would make immediate tweaks to the design in Blender. This quick turnaround maximized Dumas's valuable seat time, ensuring the project stuck to that nine-month timeframe.

Results

While the Ford team covered every eventuality virtually, reality almost bit them hard when it came time for the SuperTruck's timed Pikes Peak run. Dumas launched the machine off the line, but instead of screaming up the hill, the SuperTruck lurched to a halt after the first corner. It was completely dead.

Most drivers would have started screaming or beating the steering wheel, many opting for a combination of the two, but Dumas stayed cool. He started the process required to boot the 2,000-horsepower rolling computer. 

"Luckily, Romain had been studying the process of what to do in case that happened the night before," Root said. It took 26 agonizing seconds for Dumas to complete the process, but when he did, the SuperTruck came back into life. Dumas rocketed off again, now with a little extra motivation and adrenaline added to the mix. 

His run was near-flawless. He got to the top in 8:53.553. Despite giving everyone a half-minute handicap, Ford's SuperTruck, designed in Michigan, virtually tested in North Carolina, and built in Austria, was more than 10 seconds faster than the closest competition.