Gene Martindale grew up in a small town in Indiana, tinkering with tractors on the family farm. These days the vehicles he works on go a whole lot faster. In fact, the SVT development engineer and lead test driver is a car fanatic who lives and breathes racing. It should be no surprise then that he played a key role in developing the Ford F-150 SVT Raptor, a high-speed off-road performance truck destined to take desert pre-running by storm.

Gene not only developed the truck, he also was a driver on the team that raced the F-150 SVT Raptor R – the racing version of the production truck – at the Tecate SCORE Baja 1000 last year.

Join Gene here at 2:00 p.m. EST on April 16, 2010, for a live chat.

“Raptor proved it could handle whatever the Baja 1000 threw at us,” he said. “This was one of the defining moments in my career – driving a truck I had spent so much time on, in such an unbelievable race.”