Ford’s Roush Yates prepared 3.5 liter twin turbo V-6 EcoBoost engine powered Chip Ganassi Racing to three wins and seven podiums in TUDOR United SportsCar Championship competition in 2014, including victories at the 12 Hours of Sebring, Long Beach and Circuit of The Americas. The win at Sebring was the first for Ford since 1969.

The racing version of the V6 EcoBoost engine shares 70% of its parts with the production engine found in the Ford F-150 and Taurus SHO. “It’s a testament to the robustness of the technology that powers many of our production vehicles around the world, that our engines stood up to some of the toughest tests in North American endurance racing,” says Jamie Allison, director of Ford Racing. In all, the V-6 EcoBoost engine logged more than 15,000 racing miles.

Endurance racing tests every component of a race car to the limit. The competition places a higher value on reliability than outright speed, since time spent in the pits for repairs costs the teams dearly in lost track position. The lessons Ford engineers learn from racing get translated into greater reliability for its production engines.

Before the beginning of the 2014 season, Michael Shank Racing teamed up with Ford Racing and its 3.5-liter EcoBoost engine to break a series of closed-course speed records at Daytona International Speedway. They set a new record average lap speed of 222.971 mph around the high-banked oval, smashing the old record set back in 1987.

Auto makers around the world are downsizing their production engines to meet tighter emissions and fuel economy regulations. Ford hopes the power and reliability of its twin turbocharged V-6 engines will wean customers away from their love affair with the big, heavy and thirsty V-8 engines that have been the mainstay of the American car industry for the past 60 years. And if a little of the old “Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday” magic rubs off in the form of increased sales of Ford cars and trucks, that would be a welcome bonus, too.

Source: Ford Motor Company