Yahoo Autos 2017 Ford F-150 Raptor SuperCab
From the February 2017 issue
In my dreams, I can levitate. Always have been able to.
I can’t fly; that nonsense is for dreamers. No, I can just lift off the ground and hang there, maybe six feet from the deck. Sometimes I go up as much as 10 feet, but never much farther. This serves no actual purpose. I’m not moving anywhere. I’m not taking advantage of my elevation to pick apples, or peep in second-story windows, or avoid anything on the ground. I’m just . . . levitating.
I’m convinced after spending a couple days in the Nevada desert with Ford’s newest F-150 Raptor that it harbors similar dreams. In its promotional materials, Ford habitually shows the Raptor, both this generation and the last, leaping into the air, big wheels dangling. The corporation invariably notes that these shots are achieved through digital photo manipulation or were performed by a professional driver on a closed course. Curiously, the company sometimes mentions both provisos. But make no mistake; this beefed-up, desert-running, high-speed brute dreams of air as surely as I do.
And so, in preparation for this desert drive, I readied myself by conjuring up visions of our ruby-red Raptor suspended in midair, while the Mojave Desert streamed by underneath like a treadmill of rock and dust and crispy creosote bushes, and—sure, why not?—an adorable desert bunny or two.
The Not-Quite 400:
We aimed to retrace the route of the early Mint 400 races, but development and addled memories meant that we could only stitch together pieces of the original ’68 race, mostly along the Nevada-California border.
In reality, it’s not quite like that. The leap is more like a short guitar lick rising away from the chugging rhythm of the ground, which keeps pace with the truck until the 5700 pounds of badassery rejoins the shuffle. It never lasts long enough, the moment of giddy weightlessness. I solved this problem by doing it again and again and again until even our photographer had lost interest and refused to be a party to whatever might happen next.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’re here to test this new Raptor on the land for which it was created. We’re roughly retracing the route taken by the early Mint 400 off-road races. The same basic route on which Parnelli Jones ripped all the wheels off the specially prepared Bronco he drove in the inaugural event in 1968. (“I cauliflowered the rims,” he would later tell the Las Vegas Review-Journal.) The same event that used to hand out commemorative decanters filled with Jim Beam. The event that Hunter S. Thompson famously didn’t actually cover in his book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The same event that, in 1981, hired an almost distressingly hot Vanna White as a trophy girl.
We had no doctor of journalism, no lawyer, no Parnelli, not even Ms. White accompanying us. Instead, riding right seat was Daryl Folks, one-time desert motorcycle racer, current Nevada adventure motorcycle tour operator, and the son of Casey Folks, a longtime Mint 400 competitor and the organizer of the current Mint 400. We started from Fremont Street, a.k.a. Glitter Gulch, the historical starting point of the early races. The Mint hotel and casino, which created the race as a promotional stunt, has long since vanished from the scene. Today, Fremont Street greets us with a presumably homeless young man holding a handwritten cardboard sign reading “Kick me in the balls for $1” and a restaurant that promises a free meal to anyone who weighs more than 350 pounds.
In the almost 50 years since the first race, Las Vegas has metastasized aggressively, so our dirt drive has to wait. We need to take a clotted expressway out to our starting point some 100 miles northwest of the city, in the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Even on the open highway, the Raptor feels massive. In town, it feels roughly the same size as a garbage truck. And, keep in mind, we’re piloting the less enormous of the two available Raptors, the SuperCab. The SuperCrew version, with its four full-size, front-hinged doors, stretches an extra 11.9 inches over our truck’s already lengthy 220. But it’s not the length of the thing that poses a problem—it’s the engorged body and its trophy-truck-like box-flared fenders that make it so intimidating as a crosstown companion. At 86.3 inches, the Raptor is more than six inches wider than the already plenty bulky F-150.
This is not to say that the Raptor is slow or ponderous. Ford deleted the 6.2-liter V-8 that powered most of the last generation of Raptors and bolted in its place a pumped-up version of its twin-turbo 3.5-liter V-6, now with direct and port injection and 18 psi of boost. The new lump, which looks tiny buried in the engine bay behind an intake pipe that’s about as fat and attractive as a sewer main, brings newfound muscle. Its 450 horsepower and 510 pound-feet of torque easily beat the V-8’s output by 39 horsepower and 76 pound-feet. Combined with a weight savings of 404 pounds compared with the last Raptor SuperCab we tested (thanks, aluminum!), the Raptor is no longer just ballsy for a truck, it’s a genuinely quick machine, period. This 5696-pound linebacker barrels to 60 mph in 5.0 seconds and on through the quarter-mile in 13.7 seconds at 100 mph. And full-throttle runs are accompanied by a genuinely thrilling intake and exhaust composition. Maybe we can live without the V-8 after all.
Top: The Ford Atmospheric Dust Generator. Bottom left: Three-inch-thick Fox dampers. Bottom right: It’s not pretty, but it is powerful and dirty.
There is an odd peace that overcomes you when you’re concentrating intensely. Your hands and right foot do the driving while your eyes and mind are occupied with scanning the ground ahead for telltales of big humps, off-camber bends, and gnarly ditches and ruts. Things are happening so fast and in such oddly narrow confines that it sometimes feels as if you’re playing one of the early Atari driving games, where the vehicle sits in the bottom center of the screen and you effectively drive the road around it.
Luckily, our quiet and quite pleasurable disassociation from reality came while driving a vehicle with 13 inches of front and 13.9 inches of rear wheel travel (up 1.8 and 1.9 inches, respectively) and fat Fox Racing dampers that could soak up most of the stuff our inexperienced eyes missed. Our co-driver, Folks, would chime in periodically with, “Man, this thing is really well set up.” And he was right. It’s softer and more compliant than the old Raptor, but handier and quicker and almost entirely unperturbed. A proper desert truck, in other words. And, yes, it jumps. Oh, how it jumps.
There is but one truck in the Raptor’s class. Ford invented the factory desert-running full-size pickup with the first-generation Raptor and has been rewarded with a dedicated following and about as many sales as the company can handle. The SuperCab model starts at $49,520. Our test vehicle came with the $9345 Luxury package, which includes, well, just about everything. Here is an abbreviated list: heated and cooled leather-covered power front seats, push-button start, blind-spot warning, dual-zone climate control, integrated trailer-brake controller, power tilt/telescoping steering wheel, remote start, navigation, and the 4.10 front axle with a Torsen limited-slip differential. Ford also added the $1950 Technology package to our truck, which includes lane-keeping assist, automatic high-beams, rain-sensing windshield wipers, and adaptive cruise control. A few other smaller options—forged bead-lock-capable wheels ($1165), spray-in bed liner ($495), tailgate step ($375), and heated steering wheel ($155)—brought the total to $63,005. That’s a lot of cash. But apparently not too much since Ford says that 91 percent of customers are ordering the even-pricier SuperCrew model and 90 percent are adding on the Luxury package.
Returning to Vegas with the truck and personnel entirely covered in dust, we didn’t think that $63,000 seemed like too much to pay for the experience, or for something as unique and capable as the Raptor. After our time in the desert, we were perfectly willing to accept the occasional clunky shift from the new 10-speed and the bit of turbo lag as it rolls through town.
This truck is a dream.
Competitors
Specifications >
VEHICLE TYPE: front-engine, rear-/all-wheel-drive, 5-passenger, 2+2-door truck
PRICE AS TESTED: $63,005 (base price: $49,520)
ENGINE TYPE: twin-turbocharged and intercooled V-6, aluminum block and heads, port and direct fuel injection
Displacement: 213 cu in, 3497 cc
Power: 450 hp @ 5000 rpm
Torque: 510 lb-ft @ 3500 rpm
TRANSMISSION: 10-speed automatic with manual shifting mode
DIMENSIONS:
Wheelbase: 134.2 in
Length: 220.0 in
Width: 86.3 in Height: 78.5 in
SAE volume: F: 69 cu ft R: 51 cu ft
Cargo-box volume: 53 cu ft
Curb weight: 5696 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS:
Zero to 60 mph: 5.0 sec
Zero to 100 mph: 13.7 sec
Rolling start, 5–60 mph: 5.7 sec
Top gear, 30–50 mph: 4.2 sec
Top gear, 50–70 mph: 4.0 sec
Standing ¼-mile: 13.7 sec @ 100 mph
Top speed (gov limited): 107 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 206 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.68 g
FUEL ECONOMY:
EPA combined/city/hwy: 16/15/18 mpg
