Yahoo Autos 2024 Ford Ranger Raptor First Drive: Less overkill and better for it
STOCKTON, Utah – “Where the hell am I supposed to drive this?” was roughly my impression of the Bronco Raptor, an SUV so annoyingly wide that it needs government-mandated marker lights. It also boasts 418 horsepower, enormous 37-inch tires and a suspension designed to cushion landing back on Earth after you’ve launched 5,733 pounds off its surface. Because that’s something you can routinely do. All of the above is amplified in the F-150 Raptor, but at least that can fit a fridge in its bed. Both are basically the off-road equivalents of a Lamborghini Aventador: immensely capable, hyper-masculine and, day-to-day, incredibly ridiculous.
The new 2024 Ford Ranger Raptor is not ridiculous. Its track is 3.5 inches wider than the base truck and its fenders flared to cover the 33-inch tires, but excluding the mirrors, the Ranger Raptor's width grows by only 4.3 inches. With the mirrors in place or folded, it's exactly the same. By contrast, the Bronco Raptor is 9.8 inches(!) wider than the standard version with the mirrors folded, and even 6.4 inches wider than the big-tired Wildtrak. The Ranger Raptor is a few tenths narrower than that.
So while the Ranger's extra track and big tires grant it greater stability, the common width doesn’t leave you wincing at the sight of every branch lining a trail or searching for RV parking just to claim a sufficiently wide space. And true, the Ranger Raptor is almost 20 inches longer than its Bronco platform mate (the difference between a truck bed and an SUV cargo area), but it absolutely doesn’t feel it. While the other Raptors are intense brutes designed go fast in wide-open spaces of desert – sort of muscle cars of the sand – the Ranger Raptor feels lithe and flickable. That’s partly a result of perception given its size, but also because of how Ford’s engineers intended it.
And by “engineers,” I don’t just mean those who call Michigan home. Like the entire 2024 Ford Ranger lineup, the Raptor is a global product, and the lions’ share of its tortuous development occurred on, through and over rusty red sands Down Under.
“It’s been a labor of love for us in Australia,” said Ford Performance and Special Vehicle Programs Manager Justin Capicchiano, who made the 22-hour trek from Melbourne, Australia, to brief the assembled journalists in Utah. After making roughly the same point about the Bronco and F-150 Raptor’s ideal performance arena, Capicchiano added that achieving a higher degree of agility was of paramount importance for the Ranger Raptor. He noted that while we would be making our way through generously spaced cones in wide-open desert, his team was snaking through groves of “soap trees and eucalyptus.”
To that end, the suspension features lighter-weight aluminum control arms and a long-travel rear suspension with trailing arms and a Watts linkage. Those would be the bars funkily attached to the diff from each wheel. Crucially, like the F-150 Raptor, the rear end has coils in place of the standard truck's leaf springs. Seventeen-inch wheels (beadlocks are optional) wrap those 33-inch BFGoodrich all-terrains – no 37s here. It wouldn’t be a Raptor without Fox shocks, and the Ranger has next-generation 2.5-inch Live Valve Internal Bypass hardware that alters its damping performance based on the various drive modes or steering wheel button. They’re also swell for achieving a cushy landing, and despite all the talk of agility, the Bo and Luke Duke schtick will always be on the Raptor menu.
To that end, the front frame rails, front shock towers, rear shock brackets and suspension mounting points were all strengthened. And yes, I did jump the Ranger Raptor and, honestly, it was anticlimactic. Credit assuredly goes to the enhanced hardware, but we weren't actually allowed to give it the full, well, this ...
The restrictions were significantly eased on the handling course, which is the primary arena for the new Raptor Assault driving school that buyers of any Raptor now get a one-day admission to. Normally, the collection of small circuits cut through the desert an hour west of Salt Lake City would be a reasonable facsimile for the dusty, sandy conditions of Baja, California, which inspires the name of the Raptor’s most intense drive mode. On this day, however, the circuits are a mucky mess. Sticky mud cakes the tires, water pools at the bottom of landing zones, corners resemble pig pens … let’s just say when the driving instructor tells you there’s not going to be any grip when the goal was originally to drive on sand, you know it’s bad.
