A red supercharger housing. That’s the entire story. Roush Performance is marking its 50th anniversary and America’s 250th by painting the top of its 2.65-liter roots-type blower red instead of black and calling it the “Red Edition.” The price and the power are identical to the standard kit, which still costs $8,899.99 and still makes 705 horsepower and 635 pound-feet of torque from the Ford F-150’s 5.0-liter V-8.
Give Roush credit for not pretending this is something it isn’t. The company has been bolting superchargers onto Ford trucks for years, and the underlying hardware hasn’t changed. You still get the forged aluminum crankshaft damper, upgraded air intake, larger radiator, intercooler, new spark plugs, and recalibrated software. The twin four-lobe rotors still spin the same way. The only thing different is the powder coat.
And yet, limited-edition patriotic packaging sells. Roush knows its customer base — truck owners who appreciate American muscle, round-number anniversaries, and anything draped in red, white, or blue during the first week of July. Chevrolet is playing a similar card right now with its “Stars and Steel” trim packages across the lineup.
The kit fits 2021 through 2026 F-150s equipped with the Coyote V-8, which itself is becoming an endangered species as Ford pushes electrification and turbo four-cylinders deeper into the truck range. That scarcity gives the naturally aspirated 5.0-liter a cult following, and Roush has been happy to feed it. For context, Ford’s own factory FP700 supercharger package — which makes five fewer horsepower and 45 fewer pound-feet — pushed a test F-150 to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds.
The 720-hp Raptor R, with its Shelby-derived 5.2-liter V-8 and knobby off-road rubber, managed 3.6 seconds. The Roush kit likely slots somewhere in between, though the company wisely avoids making specific performance claims since results vary with cab size, bed length, axle ratio, and tire choice.
The same red finish already appears on Roush’s Mustang supercharger kits, which come in 740- and 810-horsepower configurations. Applying it to the F-150 blower was more a marketing decision than an engineering one, and Roush is refreshingly transparent about the limited-edition angle. The company’s own product page hedges beautifully: “We’re not promising this color comes back. We’re also not promising it won’t.” That’s the kind of honesty you get from a company that knows its audience will buy the red one precisely because it might disappear.
Roush was founded in 1976 by Jack Roush, the same year the country celebrated its bicentennial. The symmetry is neat, even if the product itself is cosmetic. Fifty years of building fast Fords is a legitimate milestone, and the company has earned the right to throw itself a party.
But here’s the thing about the aftermarket supercharger business: margins live in the details. A special color creates urgency without requiring a single new part number beyond the housing itself. The engineering is already done, the tooling is already paid for, and red paint plus a press release cost almost nothing.
At $8,900, it remains one of the more compelling dollar-per-horsepower upgrades available for a half-ton truck. The red paint is free. And somewhere in Livonia, Michigan, someone is already boxing one up for a customer who ordered it the moment the listing went live.
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