I get a lot of emails with pictures of trucks, but Bobby Patton’s new Jimco Reaper here stands out as a particularly fierce-looking manifestation of what’s known as a “luxury prerunner.” So, please, enjoy it with me.
Seems like something an adolescent son of Bruce Wayne would use for taco runs. In a fun way!
A prerunner is ostensibly made for driving the length of a long off-road racecourse ahead of race day on a scouting mission called, you guessed it, a prerun. On a prerun, a race team will survey the track and take notes on where particularly challenging and dangerous sections are.
Prerunning is a critical element of off-road racing, especially at longer events like the Baja 1000 where competition can span about 1,000 miles and take longer than 30 hours.
It’s also the most fun, in my opinion, because it’s an excuse to cruise Baja with a purpose but without the pressure of racing.
If you’re on a tight budget, by motorsport standards, you might not prerun at all. (Obviously, if you’re on a tight budget by real life standards, you ain’t wasting money going car racing.) Or, maybe you just put some good shocks and tires on a reasonably capable 4×4 and bump and grind your way down the course. You don’t need a top-tier truck to get all the way to Cabo, after all, as long as you’ve got patience.
But if you’re flush with cash and short on time, you’re going to want to prerun pretty fast. That’s where something like this Jimco rig comes in clutch.
Jimco’s a well-established purveyor of off-road racing vehicles, and this prerunner called “Reaper” is hardly its first lux desert toy. It just happens to be the first one I’ve received a nice batch of photos of to share. That makes this a great opportunity for you to examine the many visually interesting details on such a machine.
For those who can’t immediately tell: This is exceptionally capable as far as prerunners go. I mean, on paper, it’s more capable than many race cars in an actual Baja race. It sure as shit would be faster than the four-cylinder Trophy Lite and Baja Lite vehicles I myself have Baja’d in.
Jimco promises 800 horsepower on pump gas, 40-inch tires and 26 inches of wheel travel up front; 32 inches in the rear. For your reference, a stock Raptor has about 13 and 13.9, respectively.
Speaking of Ford Raptors, while this prerunner does indeed look like a two-door SuperCab Raptor it’s basically just a fiberglass body designed around a purpose-built off-road chassis. This is done so Jimco can dial the vehicle in for hauling ass over the desert, rather than work around a Ford’s factory shape which would be optimized for daily driving.
I noticed that Jimco’s website doesn’t include a list price for these, probably because each one’s built to spec and no two will cost exactly the same. But you know the refrain anyway: If you have to ask, it’s out of our range.
Anyway, time for a big photo stack. Ready? 56K stay away! (Who remembers that?)
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