You may have heard a little bit of fuss being made recently around a bakkie called the Ford Ranger Raptor. Okay if you're at all interested in anything with four wheels and which derives its power from some sort of engine (we can't exclusively say combustion engine these days), and haven't heard about the Ford Ranger Raptor with its blown 2.0-litre diesel 157kW/500Nm, lashings of go-faster bits, both mechanical and stuck-on, where on earth have you been?!
It sure looks the business, but already a lot of folks who don't really know what they're talking about and who might be deficient in areas we're not prepared to talk about in detail, are saying that 2-litres is never enough, unless it is used strictly in conjunction with diluting various forms of neat liquor. While I'd prefer to not discuss my deficiencies, I do enjoy a heady dollop of displacement above 2-litres, which brings me neatly to RGM Toyota Land Cruiser 79.
We'll get straight to it. V8 Diesel, 273kW and 913Nm! Holy moly, and as RGMotorsport says, "Farmers – or anyone for that matter – will appreciate that..." You're damn right fellas! Speaking of RGMotorsports, or Rob Green Motorsports in full, you might remember them, they've spent 25 years supercharging, fettling and generally making cars, bakkies and well, just about anything faster, powerful, louder and just plain better than standard.
For the RGMotorsport Toyota Land Cruiser 79, it gets the full Stage Three kit which compromises a 76mm Techniflow exhaust system, bigger turbocharger, a substantially enlarged intercooler to keep intake air at nice cool temperature and an upgraded clutch rated for 1 000Nm, code for; lots of abuse. Ensuring everything keeps going right, a Unichip Uni-Q engine management system is employed. Put in perspective the stock Land Cruiser 79 V8 diesel deploys a fairly formidable 151kW and 430Nm, however, meaning with the RGM Stage Three conversion, 80 percent is added to the former and 112 percent to the latter.
Predictably nothing is mentioned about fuel consumption, and if you have to ask about price, you're probably not the intended target demographic, or you should perhaps concentrate on farm profits in the immediate short-term. For interest sake, the Stage Three conversion costs R180,700 on top of the standard Land Cruiser 79 Single Cab's R586,800 asking price.
Says Rob Green, founder of RGMotorsport: “The longer I’ve been in this game I’ve come to realise that more is, indeed, more! Our 181kW Stage One and 215kW Stage Two Land Cruiser V8 packages have already proved immensely popular with a clearly-defined buyer but the feedback was that they wanted extra grunt. We’ve obliged and the main difference to the S2 is a bespoke turbocharger rather than a hybridised standard one, and the inclusion of the bulletproof clutch.”
