Let’s get one thing straight: a racetrack is no place for a truck or at least that’s what they say.

Leave it to the carbon-fiber, spoiler-wielding, 0-to-60-in-3.2-seconds crowd. The supercars, the sporty coupes, the tuned machines. Right?

Wrong. It’s time for a change.

So when I pulled into Circuit Mécaglisse in a brand Ford Maverick LOBO, things felt like I knew something that other people didn’t.

Enter The Ford Maverick LOBO

The Ford Maverick LOBO is a street truck. A new, much needed category in the truck world, in my opinion.

A sporty, quick truck that you can have all the functions of a pickup, but something fun as the driver.

Street truck culture has been around for decades but it hasn’t really been recognized or adapted into mass production by big brands until now. Ford recognized that there was an opportunity of serving a long-standing west coast subculture while providing new customers to experience something new. Win-win.

Not only is the truck lowered (0.5 inches in the front, 1.1 inches in the back), but it has performance-tuned suspension compared to the standard and bestselling Ford Maverick truck.

This gives it that race track capability and control when you are finding grip around corners. It has also been fitted with a sport-tuned powertrain with a 2.0L EcoBoost Engine that compliments a 7-speed automatic transmission. It also feels quite planted. Any time you take an curved on-ramp in a normal pickup, you almost feel like it’s going to tip over, but this feels glued to the ground throughout a turn.

It also has LOBO mode which optimizes the vehicle’s performance for closed-course driving, better cornering, grip, and stability around the track.

The test lap was to get my angles and trying to find an answer to the question, how is this truck going to actually drive on a racetrack? Should I have taken out a life insurance policy before this experience?

Then something happened.

When started my actual first lap, I stopped thinking it was a pickup truck and I started treating it like a car on track.

I went into the unknown. I trusted this LOBO truck. It didn’t feel like a mistake—it felt comfortable on the grippy surface. It handled the weight shifts of the chicanes well, I wasn’t feeling thrown around by corners, and whether it was short corners with or a longer turn, it handled it well.

I wasn’t breaking any records. I wasn’t setting purple sectors. But I was driving, in the truest sense of the word. Taking corners in something that I can make a hardware store run in.

How unique is this? I can drive on a racetrack in the morning and then head to pick up lumber for a deck job in the same day and get groceries for a BBQ in the same vehicle just after.

I didn’t go to Circuit Mécaglisse to try to beat GT car track times, I went to change my thinking about what a street truck is, can be, and what it can do. What it’s capable of, and spoiler alert, it is capable of a lot.

I was pleasantly surprised at this unsuspecting and incredibly functional dark horse.

Final Thoughts About The Ford Maverick LOBO

Sometimes you change your mind. Sometimes something surprises you and changes your mind for you.

The new Ford Maverick LOBO is not only well-appointed with all the comforts of a great highway or city driving experience, but it definitely has a sporty side to it.

You have your seating for five, you have ample under-seat storage, available power moonroof, fantastic on gas and range as well.

You also have all the capabilities of a truck. You can use the truck bed for camping, gardening, mountain bikes, powering tools and cooking for a tailgate, all from the same vehicle you ripped around a chicane 20 minutes ago.

So tell me this: Would you take a truck to a racetrack? Or are you still waiting for permission?

For more information about the new Ford Maverick LOBO, be sure to visit their website to build and price or test drive one for yourself at your local Ford dealership.