I love the Ford Maverick. This is known. I’m also not alone in this preference for Ford’s compact pickup truck. If I were to buy a Maverick, I’d almost certainly get the hybrid version. My preferences, though, were set before I realized you can swap a turbocharger from a Lincoln Corsair onto the EcoBoost 2.0-liter inline-four in the Ford Maverick and end up with a much, much faster truck.
First, watch the video, which involves the extremely common sight of a Lincoln MKZ drag racing Maverick:
For those of you who don’t spend a lot of weekends at the strip, a time in the mid 12s is extremely fast for any production car, let alone a truck. To put this in context, that’s about as fast as a 425 horsepower 2015 BMW M4 (F82) manual runs or a 485-horsepower 2021 Dodge Charger Scat Pack. In a little truck.
The owner of this particular vehicle goes by Dueces on the Maverick Truck Club forum and is known around there for having one of the fastest Mavericks in the world, if not the fastest. He was also, it seems, the first person to swap the turbo on his truck. According to a posted time slip, his Maverick ran a 12.446 quarter-mile. He’s also running the Draggy app on his phone and it shows a 0-60 mph time of about 4.26 seconds. That’s insane. By comparison, he’d gotten high-14s under ideal conditions in the same truck back when it was stock (actually, also a pretty good number).
As I mentioned above, the car sports a turbo from the Maverick’s platform-mate, the Lincoln Corsair. Initially, Deuces attempted to go with a Ranger turbo, but that didn’t quite work:
Ok, update time. Turbo is out!!! What a nightmare of a removal! I ended up doing it without removing the transfer case. But to take the turbo out from behind the engine, I had to take off the electronic wastegate actuator, all 4 coolant and oil lines, exhaust gas temp sensor, and the exhaust manifold bolts. After all that it STILL BARELY fit out the top!
So here are my discoveries.
Ranger turbo will bolt to the head, but the downpipe flange has a different pattern. It’s close, but not the same. Compressor inlet tube and outlet tube do bolt on. So, at a minimum, a downpipe will need fabricated. In all reality, the charge pipes should be switched to hard piping as well. That I will for sure leave for another time.
Zero, I repeat, ZERO of the oil and coolant lines will work. The center section of the Ranger turbo is physically larger than that of the Maverick’s. There really isn’t a way around this, unless you want to tap the turbo and use soft lines to mate to the factory lines. Me either….
So, on to some measurements. The turbo sits 7/8″ higher up than the Maverick’s stock unit, and like I said previously, the electrical connector to the EWA has plenty of length to plug into the Ranger’s EWA.
As far as the stock turbo is concerned, the compressor wheel measures 41.3mm on the inducer and 55mm on the exducer. This is compared to 46mm inducer and 61mm exducer on the Ranger turbo. The turbine wheel is similarly larger as well, but I didn’t take the housing off to measure.
Hope this is somewhat exciting to the DIY’ers in the group, as this will turn into a cheap, albeit laborious, way to get the Mav up to 310-330whp!
I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting, but that’s it for now! More pics to follow when I have signal.
Eventually, he got the Corsair turbo, which appears to the the best fit for the Maverick:
So I have a small update. The “new” turbo showed up today. It is from a 2020 Lincoln Corsair. It runs the same compressor housing and turbine housing as the Maverick’s turbo, or if not the same, extremely close. The wastegate actuator is on the bottom side of the compressor housing, just like stock as well.
The benefit, it it has the same compressor wheel dimensions as the ranger turbo, 46mm inducer and 61.5ish mm exducer. The turbine wheel looks the same, but I didn’t tear it apart to measure it.
The corsair 2.3T also uses the same downpipe gasket, so the stock (or aftermarket) downpipe will bolt right up!
I will have to order the Corsair oil and coolant lines, and I cannot guarantee that they will bolt straight to the Maverick’s 2.0, but they sure look like they do from the parts catalog photos I have been researching.
It’s worth reading the whole build thread. This owner experiments with dropping weight, figures out which intercooler works best (try the Ford ST, not the Ford RS for packaging reasons), the best tune, and other tweaks necessary to make the Maverick reliably put down power.
Dueces seems like the kind of person you dream of meeting on your single-make forum or sub-forum. He puts in the work, is willing to be experimental, seems quick to help others, and has a great attitude,
This whole thing just goes to show that, where there’s a will, there’s a way. The downside of so much platform sharing is that we end up with cars that are quite similar. The upside of so much platform sharing, well, are 12-second Mavericks.
Thanks for the article Matt! I am Dueces, and this is my Truckette!
I had to Google what the heck a Lincoln Corsair is.
One more reason for me to love the Maverick
I’m holding out hope that Ford will release a performance pack for the Maverick like they have for the Ranger that will bump the HP to around 300 and retain the warranty.
Now if they could only fix the build quality issues, it would be the perfect truck.
Well, maybe they should have just put the 2.3 corsair motor in the Tremor version. That might have made that pricy package actually somewhat exciting.
Tell me about it. A full spec Tremor is going for close to 60K with dealer markup. That’s insane money for a slightly better offroader with less towing capacity than a standard FX4.
I’d be happy with mine if it didnt leak like a sieve every time it rains.
My stock Maverick 2.0T works fine.
but does it run 12s?
Great gearhead ingenuity there!
Bookmarked the forum because I’m really curious how he provides the extra fuel needed-and whether that run is with traction control enabled
This day at the track I was running E20 with extra octane added in the form of VP Madditive. On my E30 tune, the fueling is starting to run away, as it was still all the factory fuel components. I have now swapped to a Walbro 525LPH pump for better flow, so I am hoping this corrects my fueling and then some!
I had a Focus ST and I’m surprised anyone would want the intercooler as it heat-soaked in that lighter vehicle, though I suppose it ran a smaller turbo that put out more heat at high rpm, so maybe it works here because of that or it simply isn’t an issue with plenty of time between runs. I’m not surprised at the change in power. I imagine the Maverick uses about the same size turbo as the ST, which was virtually lag free, but ran out of power at around 5500. On the ST, some people reported easier consistent launches with the lag and better mileage from less boost at lower loads with the (reasonably) larger turbos.
The intercooler I used is an aftermarkent Focus RS unit. It’s huge, and definately not a hindrence in performance.
I wonder why a turbo swap would make that much difference? Unless the stock 2.0 turbo is power limited by the compressor choke line, and the 2.3 (that I assume he’s using) just has a lot more flow…
I mean you can make any engine make stupid power levels, at the cost of longevity. Ford has to sell vehicles that survive through the warranty period. Guarantee running that much boost = this engine isn’t going to last 200k+ like a stock one would.
It’s where and how the power is delivered. A small turbo is great for mid-RPM torque but runs out of steam at higher revs since it spools up quickly due to a smaller impeller and compressor. A larger turbo takes longer to spool but puts down more power high in the RPM range since it’s sized to make use of those high velocity exhaust gasses. The first is good for daily driving while the second is good for drag runs.
That’s not getting into variable geometry turbos that can sometimes do both.
On the stock turbo I ran 12.72@108mph if I remember correctly. That factory turbo impressed me a bunch to make a 3700lb truck run that fast! The factory turbo is more than 99.9% of owners will ever need.
That is insanely quick for that.