Outlaw Crawlin'

An Open Cheque and No Rules … the Right Way to Build a Ranger.

- Dan Everett

IMAGINE just for one moment there was no such thing as a defect: no engineering. no mod plates, no perilous drives on long weekends waiting for the local constabulary to light up your mirrors with their blue and red party lights. What would you build? A big block beast? A touring rig with a GVM rivalling a Mack Truck? Maybe you’d gut a late model dual cab and turn it into a street-driven rock crawler to end all rock crawlers. Now imagine you’re Ford America, or axle gurus Dana, or Dirt Cinema, and that the chequebook is blank.

It’s this very position a tightknit group of marketing gurus and gear heads found themselves in as they rolled a righ-hand drive PXII Ford Ranger out of a container on the California dock, intent on building a show rig that’d not only show their capabilities but turn heads all around the world. A special order put in from the Southern Hemisphere to show off the soon-to-be-released Ranger to the USA market. Ideas flowed, concepts bounced back and forth, and all of it irrelevant because the end product is so wild, so unfathomably modified for Australia that it sets its own benchmark and then completely shatters it.