The Lightning You Grew Up With
Before it became an electric pickup, the Ford F-150 Lightning was the hottest version of America’s best-selling pickup you could get. Sold for two generations, it was the early beginnings of the performance pickup genre and remains one of the coolest street trucks you can get.
The first one used a 5.8-liter engine from the LTD Crown Victoria police package. It then got a host of goodies that raised power from 180 hp to 240 hp, along with several upgrades to the suspension. Ford then went ham on the second-gen Lightning with a supercharged 5.4-liter with 360 hp. It’s a shame that the succeeding generation didn’t get the same treatment, although the name had been revived as an EV pickup.
Coyote All the Fords
Ford’s Coyote engine replaced the long-running Modular unit in 2011 and has since found its way across several models. The V8 has also been swapped several times in older Ford products by adventurous tuners. That brings us neatly to one particular F-150 Lightning over in Maryland.
Next Gen Performance Center has been tuning Coyote engines for quite some time already. Formerly known as JPC Racing, the shop has built several pro-street cars and also offers go-fast parts for anything that’s fitted with that 5.0-liter engine. They’ve gotten their hands on a second-gen F-150 Lightning, and it pulls pretty sweet numbers.
The Mods
The original supercharged 5.4-liter made good power back in the day, but even a bog-standard 5.0 V8 in a modern F-150 makes for power these days. It’s already good for 400 horsepower, and putting that in the lighter tenth-generation model should make it faster than the old Lightning.
Not content with that, it’s been strapped with a turbo to give it a healthy helping of boost. So, from 400 hp, it now makes, well, a lot more than that.
Dyno Pulls
With about 13 to 14 lbs of boost, it was already laying down 755 hp on the dyno. When it was cranked up to 19 lbs, power jumped to 955 hp, which is over double from the stock setup. Of course, it has more robust internals, and the engine got more goodies than just the turbo.
Next Gen Performance also tried to give it an even bigger boost afterwards. With 21 lbs, it actually went over 1,000 hp, although it’s experimental for now. That said, the shop probably won’t run it with that much boost all the time. Next Gen’s aim is to make it streetable and somewhat friendly.
Still, the thought of a second-gen Lightning with that much punch is amusing. We’re pretty sure it’ll be faster than the EV version, too.
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