RAPTOR’S RETURN

The all-new Ford Ranger is on a mission to take over the double-cab market exactly the same way the old model did. Only this time, it’s being led into battle by the poster vehicle for premium pick-ups, the epic Raptor. And this time, the race-bred range-topper is packing heavier offroad and performance weapons than ever

Words: Olly Sack

Pictures: Ford

In the real, workaday off-road world, the Ford Ranger is the most anticipated new vehicle of the year. Yes, even more than the Ineos Grenadier. The old model sold by the bucketload ever since coming to the UK in 2012 – and with its futuristic looks and mouth-watering spec list, its replacement has had the nation’s pick-up buyers on the edge of their seats ever since it was first unveiled.

Of course, if we’re talking about the real, workaday off-road world, there’s one particular version of the Ranger that doesn’t really compute. The Raptor costs enough to make it more of a luxury toy than a working pick-up (it’s in Grenadier territory price-wise, in fact) and you can’t get your VAT back on it, so for 99% of Ranger buyers it’s the one they look at longingly and shrug.

Still, what a halo vehicle to have at the top of your range. Ford knows this, and that’s why the first part of its UK launch saw us driving a Raptor… with no other versions of the Ranger to be seen. They’re on their way, very soon indeed as we write this, but our introduction to the new big thing in pick-ups was to be aboard the big thing among big things.

Previously, the Raptor was only available with one engine choice, but in the new model this has doubled. There’s still a 2.0-litre diesel with 205bhp – but now, would you believe, petrol is back.

And it’s back in the Raptor we’ve got on test here, too, in the shape of a 3.0-litre V6 developing 292bhp and 362lbf.ft. Performance figures are 111mph and 7.9 seconds; economy, to stretch the meaning of the word, is 20.4mpg and 315g/km.

Let’s park the latter figures for a while, lest they appear as an inconvenient deal-breaker before we’ve even climbed on board. The appearance of such a lusty, grin-inducing but undeniably juicy engine should remind you, if you needed any reminding, that the Raptor may be a Ranger but it’s not a commercial vehicle. We’ve said before that people will buy one as their second or third car, the same way they might spend similar money on something like a Porsche Cayman S – the difference being that Porsche Guy takes delivery and immediately books a trip to the

Nurburgring, whereas Raptor Man gets set for a dune-bashing expedition to Morocco.

So, we’re not really here to give our first impressions on the Ranger as a work truck. We’re here to tell you how much fun you can have in the new Raptor. Inevitably, we’ll notice some stuff that will

The Raptor’s suspension is at the heart of its extraordinary talents off-road. It’s equipped with Fox shocks – on the 3.0 V6, as seen here, these are Live Valve units, while the 2.0 diesel runs a tuned version of the Position Sensitive dampers used on the previous Raptor. In each case, shock settings are tuned automatically via the drive mode palette be the same across the whole of the range, but fundamentally we’ve travelled down to Slindon, near Arundel in Sussex, to get on board and give it death.

The launch event involved an hour or so on a variety of roads followed by a session at Slindon Safari, a huge old quarry that’s become probably the best known off-road site in the south of the country. As is the way of things on a weekday in Sussex, there’s only a certain amount we can tell you about what the Raptor is like on the road, but at least the almost non-stop heavy traffic gave us time to settle in to what’s certainly the most fancily designed cabin yet to be seen on a UK pick-up.

The highlight is an enormous tablet-style infotainment screen, whose vertical positioning puts you in mind of a Tesla. It’s very impressive and from what we could discern is easy to use, logical to navigate around and quick enough in its responses never to confound your efforts. As always, the graphics are down to personal taste, though to us they came over as being businesslike rather than elegant.

We’re not sure if ‘elegant’ is a word we’d use for the Raptor’s cabin in general, however impressive it might be. It’s exciting to sit in and has quite a convincing sporty feel, but the amount of different tones and textures adorning its various surfaces leave your eyes struggling to relax as you survey your surroundings. None of it is ugly or cheap looking in any way, but it’s not what we’d call coherent either. There’s clearly a large element of personal taste in that feeling, though, and hand on heart we’re not certain that it won’t go away when we spend more time aboard a Raptor.

What we can say is that there’s quite a lot of hard plastic in the cabin, particularly on the lower dash, door cards and floor console. It’s a reminder that while the Raptor might be a performance vehicle, it’s still a work truck deep down.

We can also say that the seats are good and comfortable, having initially been worried that they were going to be backache specials. The leather covering them feels more tough and stout than soft and supple, but they’re supportive in all the right places and, as is often the case with sports seats, they get more comfortable the longer you sit in them.

In the rear, whereas the previous version of the Ranger was a game-changer with the knee room it offered, this one is merely good. A six-footer will have their knees pressed deep into the recess in the seat ahead if it’s been adjusted for someone similarly tall, though at least they won’t struggle for headroom or a view through the window next to them. The rear is equipped with old and new styles of USB port as well as a 3-pin inverter, allowing you to plug in to the mains just so long as your device isn’t going to busting 400W (a limit which could have been chosen specifically with power tool battery chargers in mind).

So at first glance, the Raptor’s cabin is not unlike that of the old model – very well equipped and full of styling touches, but not quite able to disguise its underlying nature which is that of a workaday pick-up truck.

Driving it, on the other hand, is completely unlike your typical one-tonne experience. This is where the Raptor is built to excel, and that’s exactly what it does.

It’s not all about the engine – though those performance figures actually sound like quite a conservative estimate when you’re laying down lines at a T-junction with a lovely six-pot snarl filling your ears. In particular, this has gone to be one of the vehicles of any kind in which the various modes on the dial make such a big difference.

It’s never less than lively, obviously. But putting it into Sport mode feels like letting it off the leash, particularly when the exhaust note changes from a muted burble to an urgent rasp. It sounds joyous from inside the cabin, encouraging you to get on the loud pedal and make fun things happen.

Shifting into Sport also engages four-wheel drive, so Ford is here for limpet-like grip rather than tail-out naughtiness. The ride firms up too (not that it was ever spongy) and the steering sharpens – again, it’s never less than positive, but the power assistance and damping are dialled back a little to give you more feel, something that’s surprisingly evident as you get into the corners.

Between all the various shapes, tones and textures, the cabin’s design doesn’t give your eyes much of a chance to relax. Quality is decent overall, albeit with a lot of hard plastic on the dash and floor console, but the vertically set media screen does its job very well. Knee room in the rear seats is good if not exactly epic – it doesn’t change the world the way the old Ranger did when it was launched, but one six-footer can still sit behind another without either having to suffer We suspect the Raptor’s sports seats may take a chunk out of the available space, however, and that more workaday models will have more to offer in the back

As we mentioned, our all too brief test route included an infuriating amount of traffic. Where it did finally melt away enough for us to cut loose, the Raptor instantly demonstrated its potential. A weekend in North Yorkshire or the Elan Valley would seal the deal, one suspects – certainly, it’s going to be a blast on A and B-roads in a way that no other double-cab can come close to matching. Drop it into Comfort mode for the motorway and once more, that’s exactly what you get. It’s as stable as you like, with no need to mess about making constant micro-adjustments to the steering to keep it on line. There seems to be a good deal less in the way of less thumping and jolting from the suspension than we experienced in the previous Raptor, too. There’s only the slightest bit of buffeting from the wing mirrors to detract from its general level of refinement; you might agree that that’s only to be expected, since they’re about the size of a pool table. Engine noise and road rumble, meanwhile, are kept well and truly in the background.

In this mode, too, the lighter steering makes it a pleasure to drive around town. People who’ve never piloted a pick-up might think that sounds ridiculous, but the combination of a high driving position, palm-of-your-hand steering and instant get-up-and-go through a seamless 10-speed auto make all so easy. During tight manoeuvring, we found that while flicking the selector between drive and reverse, it was far too easy to throw it into park by accident, but this aside it never once felt like a handful during our brief first drive. The same can be said of its off-road abilities. These are divided into two parts – in standard Off-Road mode, which you use for basically everything, and then in Baja mode which you’d use in the frankly unlikely event that you found yourself with the opportunity to drive it flat out over rough terrain.

Since this is the Raptor’s calling card, we’ll start there. If you were to drive it like this on a green lane, you’d be fully deserving of all the trouble coming your way. To do so on someone else’s land, either you’re having a bit of a hoon or you’ve entered some sort of race.

If you’ve got your own land, fair play to you. Or, and to us this seems like the most likely scenario, you’re going to enjoy those trips down to Morocco where you’re going to base yourself in Ouarzazate and spend a few days heading into the northern edges of the Sahara with your mates to play in the dunes. As we mentioned above, to us this feels like the off-road equivalent of doing the ‘Ring thing in a sports car – and cliched though it might be, from behind the wheel it didn’t sound half bad.

That’s not just because we’re fans of Morocco. Mainly it’s because in Baja mode, the Ranger is just staggeringly good. If you’re not used to competitive off-roading, flooring it on a loose

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We didn’t think the day would ever dawn when we saw another petrol-engined pick-up in the world, but here the Raptor is with a 3.0-litre V6 whose 292bhp and 362lbf.ft gives it some real pace to go with its race-bred chassis. Obviously, no-one has managed to change the laws of physics in the intervening decades since the last petrol unit was lost from the market, so 20.4mpg is the bucket of cold water – but if you can wear that, your reward is a smooth and composed performance around town, effortless cruising on the motorway and no end of entertainment when you want it. The latter comes complete with a deliciously rude exhaust note, too, to give you even more to smile about surface is something of an alien experience, but rather than sitting there spinning wheels it simply takes off.

After that, it’s a toss-up between its suspension and braking as to which is more astonishing. Mainly, when you’re hammering it over rough ground with the body sitting stable and the wheel travel doing all the work, you’re agog at how good it is – but then you get on the anchors and pretty much straightaway you’re thinking that wow, this is even better. After that, as the engine sings away and you chuck it into corners with the confidence of a seasoned comp safari expert (which, God knows, we’re not), you begin to realise that actually you hardly need to be touching the brakes at all. Its suspension, and again its steering, really are that good.

Would it be pushing it to say that this is an out-of-the-showroom race car? It’s not going to compete with the Tomcats and Warriors of this world, obviously, but if I was Ford I’d be looking at putting on a single-marque series in standard production form.

That’s what makes the Raptor unique in the pick-up market. However it’s highly capable in everyday off-road conditions too. Drop it into low range and it follows the ground with great suppleness and flexibility – and while we didn’t bury it in deep mud (which of course is just a test of your tyre choice anyway), getting it to break traction takes some serious dedication. The 3.0-litre model has locking front and rear diffs (it’s just the rear on the 2.0-litre diesel) and they let it cover the sort of terrain you’d struggle to walk on. In Britain, the main problem you’ll have is finding somewhere that lets you make the most of it without being in a constant sense of panic over what’s about to happen to your body panels – something that’s always the case with new vehicles, but even more so when they’re this capable and, of course, this big.

There are other things about the Raptor that are big, too. We mentioned its thirst, which according to the official figures measures up at 20.4mpg. That’s pretty fearsome, obviously, but after precisely three ours and seven minutes’ driving the gauge on the dash told us we’d managed to get that down to 13.8mpg. Admittedly, there was a lot of off-roading in that, and no small amount of heavy-footed silliness (just for the pur- poses of research, obviously) but if you’re going to buy one of these things it’s not to drive like your granny, is it?

That’s why, despite the fact that we normally like diesels (and, it must be said, we haven’t yet driven the 2.0-litre Raptor), after this showing we’d recommend going the whole hog. The 3.0 V6 costs £58,900, so obviously it’s not a cheap toy, but that’s only £2400 more than the diesel – and as well as an extra ton of horsepower, give or take, you also get more up to date Fox shocks, a front locker (the diesel has just the rear), switchable exhaust note settings and steering wheel switches for the drive modes. Even if it were two vehicles with the same engine, that would be enough to justify the price.

The Raptor has always been something special in the truck market – not so much a truck at all as a truck shaped performance car. Now, more than ever, it has the performance to go with its image. Whether it’s as a daily driver or a big boy’s plaything, this is one hell of a machine. If you’ve got sixty grand to spend on a truck, our advice would be to do it right – and from the driver’s seat, the Raptor gets it very right indeed.