Ford Ranger Raptor | The Explorers Club

23 October 2024 Redazione News, Stories, Tested

Words Alessandro Marrone / Photos S. Lomax

At last. When you spend too much time in your comfort zone, you almost lose track of time. It’s as if everything flows independently of our actions. You feel tossed around in a state of apathetic torpor with a series of images that pass in front of you: days, weeks, months. But today is not that day. Today is finally the time to load up on the necessary for an out of town expedition, on one of those roads that point towards the wildest sides of a mountain and begin to climb upwards only to end you don’t even know where. Or at least I really have no idea where the road might lead: partly because once the path ends there are no signs to define a hypothetical destination, but also because we don’t even know how far we’ll be able to proceed, given that yet another twist of winter has once again thrown snow where the spring season should soon begin.

If I can be honest, I don’t care much. A little planning this time, despite what I may have always recommended. It constantly rains, which means that at high altitudes there is snow and some landslides that can only make today’s trip in a small corner of the Western Alps, on the border between Italy and France – for a change – more adventurous as we expect to find a path that at least in its initial portion accommodates the generous dimensions of the pick-up that will accompany us: the new Ford Ranger Raptor.

The new Ranger has changed considerably compared and while maintaining intact those distinctive traits that immediately make it identifiable among the various proposals in the segment, it brings with it the good things it showed a couple of years ago on the occasion of our expedition on the wild curves of Rocca La Meja. But with the new model there are several new features that will delight those who love this type of car and not only, first of all the possibility of choosing it with a petrol engine, just like the one of our test. It is a 3-liter turbocharged V6 and represents the most inclined to fun choice you can opt for in the old continent. That said, the Ranger Raptor – the 3.0 – is still capable of meeting most of its customers’ heavy duty needs. Today it will have a different task, you don’t put anything in its 1.56-meter-long cargo compartment with a 652-kg load capacity (a little less than a standard Ranger), but you shoot it like a cannonball on a dirt path recently restored after a winter that was all too reluctant to leave.

The Raptor is aesthetically unmistakable. The front fascia, for example, abandons the horizontal profiles in favor of a gigantic plastic band that knows only one creed: FORD. It is wider, more muscular, fits 17” wheels and specific All-Terrain tires. In addition, there are LED daytime lights, air intakes, side steps in cast aluminum and a sport-bar between the cabin (here in Italy it’s only available as double-cab version) and the back floor. Back there we then have two exhaust pipes and trust me that they really know how to make themselves heard. Once you climb into the cockpit you already feel on top of the world, the interior is deeply revisited, but still practical and ergonomic. In front of the driver there is a digital instrumentation, while in the center we have a huge vertical display of over 12 inches: from here you control sat navigator, the infotainment system and numerous parameters of the Raptor, such as the differential lock. Yes, because in addition to traction on the rear axle only – which is preferred on dry asphalt – you can engage four-wheel drive and unleash the almost three hundred horsepower on any surface, with the hope that it is rough enough to try to put our pick-up in trouble. If necessary, you can lock the rear differential, or the front one and at that point you are sure you’ll get out of any situation, even the harshest. I start the engine and from the multifunction steering wheel I tinker by setting the sportiest response from shock absorbers and steering, while I choose the most extreme exhaust mode called Baja. The neighbors will know that you are leaving and they’ll just can’t do anything about it.

Among the 7 driving modes I choose the one I prefer the most: flat out. And so, I begin to climb in altitude surrounded by a cloud of dust, with the tires that bite and swallow stones, letting them bounce on the underbody and making me move forward without perceiving the slightest mechanical effort that occurs under the comfortable sports seats with orange profiles. The transmission is a 10-speed automatic and although the petrol engine doesn’t have the torque of a turbo-diesel, the 491 Nm are ready from just 2,300 revs, moving this two-and-a-half tons orange behemoth with ease, but – to my amazement – with a stiffness of set-up that filters out even the most challenging sections, leaving me to concentrate on keeping the wheel towards the center of the trail. It’s all too easy and as the 3-liter revs as the exhaust burbles like a giant well guzzling buckets of petrol, there’s also way for acting in first person on the gear changes, perhaps leaving a lower ratio and exploiting a slight amount of rear-wheel spin on corner exit. The paddles on the steering are cast magnesium and you don’t just pinch them, you have to hit them hard, which is fantastic.

With a window slightly open I can hear the whistle of the turbo that mingles with the sound of the V6 and the grinding of the tires on the strip of dirt and stones. The Raptor moves with disarming ease and demonstrates how gravel roads are its natural habitat, especially if approached with little brains and a lot of recklessness. The credit certainly does not go to the person sitting behind the wheel, but largely to the 2.5” Fox suspension, a system with total electronic control that provides manual adjustment via a control on the steering wheel, just to set the response in the ideal way depending on your needs and the road, or even better the lack of a proper road. Moving a 5.3 meters pick-up (the Raptor is then 2.2 meters wide and 1.93 meters high) driving as you would on track at the wheel of a sports car has never been so exciting – and dusty. These situations are addictive, but they are surpassed by something even bigger and more majestic, namely the landscape that opens up before our eyes once we reach 2,000 meters above sea level.

I turn off the engine and while the wind tries to cover the ticking of the mechanical parts that take a breath, I open the door and enjoy the spectacle that nature reserves for those who know that to be amazed you need nothing more than a row of mountains overlooking meadows interrupted only by a strip of land that twists towards a sudden end, where we cannot continue with motor vehicles. It is the uncontaminated nature that embraces the mountains, a small corner of quiet and peace of the senses that in a handful of days (compared to the end of May, the time I am writing this article) will officially open its temple of natural beauty.

Back to the driving modes, among the 7 available we have Normal and Sport, which certainly do not need introductions. Slippery instead offers a safer ride on uncertain surfaces. Among the off-road ones there is Rock Crawl that allows optimal control on rocky terrain, Sand that optimizes gear changes and power delivery on sand and snow, Mud/Ruts that offers maximum grip when starting and maintaining the vehicle’s momentum and Baja, which is the one that immediately makes me imagine it as the tip of a dust comet, maximizing off-road performance at high speeds. I don’t need to repeat it, stepping on the gas is pure pleasure, especially because it doesn’t often happen that you do it behind the wheel of something so ideologically far from your typical performance standards. Ford thinks the same and if the 292 horses are not a disarming power, they are enough to move the Raptor in a decidedly rapid manner along rough terrains.

The fact is that there is no obstacle capable of intimidating: potholes, ditches, scree slopes. Nothing. The Raptor destroys curves where we were given the opportunity to really put it under stress (a path closed to traffic in a private area) and advances kilometer after kilometer until I reach the end of the road again. Maybe I need another planet, an even more extreme place. Or maybe we really have found one of the most fun pick-ups out there. Remove the maybe, it’s just like that. The new Ranger starts at around €44,000, for the 2-liter diesel with 170 horsepower. To get a Raptor you need to go up to €63,000 for the 2-liter diesel with 210 horsepower, while the only petrol variant starts at €65,700, which despite being a demanding figure really offers a lot and in every imaginable aspect.

I look around, irresponsibly searching for a hint of a path where there’s nothing close to that. Suddenly my eyes are drawn to the main road, that snake of gravel that brought me up here, where I can observe the villages from above, finding myself at the same level as the peaks, both the most distant and the closest. A quick glance at the photographer is enough for me to shift into D and floor the throttle. Just a fraction of a second and the wheels skid, forming a cloud of dust that blasts us with an intense roar and that accompanies us along the frenetic descent. Go big or go home, so I keep down on the following curves, letting the rear widen. Driven by a mixture of inertia and recklessness, between complacency and the awareness that the Raptor is the pick-up – or rather the car – that I would take home with me.