Meet the World’s Most Expensive 2017 Ford Raptor by Deberti Designs

18 Sept 2017

Brad Deberti posing with his latest design: The EAA F-22 Ford Raptor

Each year, the Experimental Aircraft Association hosts an event called Gathering of the Eagles at their annual AirVenture show in Wisconsin. The purpose is to raise money for the EAA’s numerous youth aviation initiatives. Like the Young Eagles program, and the Sport Pilot Academy, which trains qualified young people to get their sport pilot license. For the last decade, the Ford Motor Company has donated custom vehicles to be sold during their charity auction. Nearly all of these special Fords have been based on a Mustang GT or a Shelby Mustang variant. Except for this year. Attendees of the 2017 EAA AirVenture event had a chance to bid on a customized EAA 2017 Ford F-150 Raptor, which had been designed as a tribute to the Lockheed F-22 Raptor fighter plane. It was a one-of-a-kind truck, that has an equally unique backstory. And oh yeah, it sold for a record-setting price of $300,000!

The award winning 2016 Ford Raptor PreRunner by Deberti Designs from SEMA 2016

At the 2016 SEMA Show in Las Vegas, a young man named Brad Deberti won the 2016 SEMA Young Gun Award, the 2016 Ford Motor Company Design Award, and a 2016 SEMA Top 10 Award in the Battle of the Builders competition. As a result of all this attention, Ford asked Brad to come up with a design for another custom Raptor. So he and his father Doug put together a rendering and sent it to the Ford design team. They sent back a paint scheme, and ultimately approved everything that the Deberti’s had suggested.

It might look stock, but the one-off EAA 2017 Ford Raptor F-22 is a true show truck

They couldn't go overly crazy with the design because it was intended to have a more broad appeal for potential buyers at the auction. So they did a lot of tasteful enhancements to the factory design. For example, they took the factory geometry and plugged it into a CAD program. This allowed Deberti Designs to stretch out the factory fender flares 1 1/2 inches, and widen the track by 1 1/2 inches. Doug Deberti explained that they did this so, “The tires don't kick stuff up all over the paint.” Next, Brad machined molds for the bodywork then hand laid the carbon fiber. Doug continued: “They're all one-off parts (speaking of the carbon fiber body panels). If someone wanted a set of those, it would be very expensive to do. You know, we’ll never sell another set of those, because they cost so much money.”

This custom titanium grill literally cost more than a 2017 Ford Raptor

The grille and tailgate of the F-22 Ford Raptor are made out of layered titanium, and both of those parts literally cost more than the truck itself (FYI: a 2017 Ford Raptor starts at $50k). Since titanium too hard to drill through, Brad designed the grille in a 3D CAD file, then had it printed out of titanium (which took around 80 hours to do). This process is known as Direct Metal Laser Sintering and requires a special machine that uses a powerful optic laser to basically melt titanium powder into the desired form. Doug explained, “It’s a neat process, but it's very expensive to do. Originally, Brad had planned to give the grille a natural titanium finish. But the Ford Design team decided they wanted a more monochromatic finish. That way the grille blended with the rest of the truck’s color scheme.” So they painted the grille to match the rest of the truck, then installed amber LED lights behind layered plexiglass, to make it look like the F-22's afterburners were glowing. As you can see in the pictures, the look they achieved is incredible.

Notice the glowing afterburners in the titanium F-22 Raptor grill

Behind that amazingly expensive grille is a 3.5L EcoBoost V6 that has been tuned to produce a whopping 545 horsepower and 660 lb-ft (which is 95-hp and 150 lb-ft more than stock). This extra Raptor bite came courtesy of Whipple, which created a computer system that basically tricks the ECU into thinking it needs to make the turbos deliver more boost. The Deberti F-22 Ford Raptor also gets a much bigger Whipple Mega Cooler intercooler, and a special intake tube connected to a high-flow K&N air filter. The end result is a truck that performs as good as it looks.

The custom titanium tailgate on the F-22 Ford Raptor by Deberti Designs

“We have fun, it’s a neat process.” Doug Deberti said of building this custom 2017 Ford Raptor. “The reason why everything is so expensive on that truck is because somebody is going to pay a lot of money for it. It's a one-off. We would never build another one of those trucks. Everything that Brad and I build is a one-of-a-kind, that's why they're so expensive. There's a lot of people out there that like having something that nobody else has. And this EAA F-22 Raptor is a perfect example. There's probably $160,000 worth of parts in it alone. It’s a very unique truck.” Apparently, the bidders agreed, and the price shot up to $300,000 very quickly, which is a record price for a Ford Raptor.

We at K&N congratulate Brad & Doug Deberti on their high-flying Raptor’s success!