Our man loved running the original, and this one takes everything to another level
MATT PRIOR
FIRST REPORT
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT
To see if a Baja-ready pick-up truck can handle the Wild West that is British roads
As I write this, I’ve just stepped out of a Range Rover Sport SV. You may have read about it in last week’s mag. It’s a tremendously able car, with the broadest abilities of any production vehicle on sale. And yet, and yet: if I had to wake up every morning forever to find just one 4x4 outside my house, I’d still rather it were a Ford Ranger Raptor.
I’m hopelessly smitten by it, which is silly, because I really like small, light cars and this is a 5.4m-long, 2454kg off-roader that typically carries one person (me) and returns only 21mpg, even when I’m not using all of its capabilities, which is always, because it was made for an environment I don’t live in. The spiders, snakes, guns and bears of Australia or America have put me off emigrating so far, but the idea of having a Ranger Raptor and somewhere I could stretch its legs are the sort of things that could have me applying for a residency visa.
For the uninitiated, the Raptor is the Ford Performance variant of the company’s staple ‘compact’ pick-up truck. It’s a double-cab one with five seats but very different suspension than usual. Its specialist set-up with three-way adjustable dampers by off-road racing expert Fox gives it Baja Rally-style gait, so it can go off road very, very fast.
It has been made even faster in this Raptor by a twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre V6 petrol engine, an option that Brits were denied last time around, when it was exclusively offered as a four-cylinder diesel. And was still great.
In other markets (such as Australia, where it was largely developed), this engine is allowed to make 392bhp, but for the UK, where we have petrol particulate filters and EU regulations to skirt around, it’s limited to 288bhp.
That’s enough for a 0-62mph time of 7.9sec, and I will admit that, on British public roads, that’s enough. There are times exiting roundabouts when it wouldn’t hurt to have more oomph to push past a Volkswagen ID 3 driver who will accelerate quickly but stop at 60mph, but there’s only so much power and torque the BF Goodrich rear tyres can deploy anyway, especially in the wet or extreme cold.
The Raptor has four-wheel drive, of course, and seven driving modes too, but in its default normal operating mode, it’s rear-driven. Presumably that makes it mor
