TOOELE VALLEY, UTAH — It feels like it was just a short while ago that Ford rolled out the F-150 Raptor — a name denoting the most over-the-top, ridiculous, off-road race rig that could be bought with a factory warranty — and in doing so sparked something of a trend. To my surprise, it’s been more than 10 years since we were introduced to that desert runner, and it’s even adopted a couple of siblings in the form of the Bronco Raptor — and this all-new 2024 Ford Ranger Raptor. We were invited to Ford’s Off-Road Performance centre outside of the charming little town of Tooele, at the foot of the rocky mountains in Utah, to check out the newest badass Baja truck.
Let me be clear about this: it’s not a euphemism or Ford marketing schtick to call it a Baja truck. It’s not Baja-style; the Ranger Raptor has run and won its class at the gruelling Baja 1000, a brutal thousand-mile blast across a mix of barren and broken Earth. Despite proving its providence in California, the Ranger Raptor cut its teeth in Australia, where Ford’s performance division there ran it across the Finke Desert Race in and out of Alice Springs, over and over again, as a trial-by-fire for this lil’ beast.
This unique terrain on which the Ranger Raptor was born and raised has given it a unique identity and feel among its Cretaceous cousins. The F-150 Raptor is a brute, raised to roar (and fly) across the Baja peninsula. The Bronco’s designed with more of a focus on articulation, the ability to crawl up and over anything — and then fly. The Ranger is designed to feel athletic, nimble, quick, and tight, scampering over the layers of loose sand that makes up its Oceanic incubation chamber.
And then flying, because Raptor.
This is not to imply that the Ranger Raptor isn’t an overbuilt beast. It’s nearly 1,000 pounds heavier than the non-reptilian Ranger; only the middle section of the fully boxed, high-strength steel frame is untouched, while everything else has been gone over with a fine-tooth comb laced with steroids. The ends of frame, suspension, engine, transmission, differentials, brakes, and even body panels are all beefed-up to meet the Raptor’s mission statement, sharing very little with the Ranger on which it’s based.
The front and rear sections of the frame are completely different. They both carry 3.5 additional inches of track width gained from relocating drive components, not just wheel offsets. The front is heavily reinforced with much tougher shock towers and gigantic forged aluminum control arms, while the rear is similarly built up with massive mounting points for the 2.5-inch Fox LiveValve dampers. Ford also uses a Watts Linkage to help triangulate the rear end under extreme cornering loads at any point of its foot-long travel.
The course that makes up the Tatts Finke race out of Alice Springs is unique among desert races. It’s extremely fast, demanding an incredibly competent chassis to confidently slice through fine silt at breakneck speed. The director of the program owns a Ranger Raptor himself and has run the route many times, setting pace that would take class victories. These people are serious enthusiasts who are serious about delivering a serious product to other serious enthusiasts.
The Ranger Raptor is powered by a 3.0-litre twin-turbocharged V6, managed by a 10-speed automatic transmission. It’s very similar to what’s in the Bronco Raptor, but slightly re-tuned for a broader torque spread; 90 per cent of its 405 horsepower and 430 pound-feet of torque is available from idle all the way up to redline. It’s fitted with an anti-lag system that keeps the turbos spinning, so that pool of power is instantly ready to dig in and pull you through a muddy rut the instant you get back on the skinny pedal, with the 10-speed gearbox banging through gears all the way.
The chassis chops that this has yielded are kind of astonishing. On Ford’s Handling and Baja courses, the Ranger Raptor handled remarkably well, displaying fantastic balance with eager turn-in, and a proclivity to rotate throughout a corner and carry it predictably through a fast exit. These are all terms I would usually reserve for, you know, a car. An excellent car. On dry pavement.
The Ranger Raptor steers shockingly well, too. The beautifully gauged steering rack precisely telegraphs what the front end is doing, and after only a few fast laps of getting to know the Raptor, I was able to fly through dirt corners and kiss cones like it was nothing. I was just starting to really get into the swing of it before moving onto the next flex of the Raptor’s capabilities.
After flying around on Ford’s Baja track in the valley of Tooele, we crawled up the mountains surrounding it. The Raptor is imbued with a slew of tools to make any situation a cinch, and we used nearly all of them in this journey. Off-road and rock crawl drive modes tailor the locking front and rear differentials, active shocks, and four-wheel-drive to best tackle a situation. Everything can also be tweaked to your exact need or preference on the fly using of the off-road menu on the centre screen and the MyMode shortcut button on the steering wheel.
There’s also a number of handy trail cameras so you can better see what you’re up against. The front-facing one that does most of the legwork in rock crawling gets a dedicated washer jet to keep it clean, and the display has an overlap of your tire path so you can confidently pick a path over boulders and blind crests. Along with hill descent control that works impeccably — and smartly doesn’t defeat itself if you touch the brakes — the same system works as a hill ascent control, allowing you to focus on picking a perfect path while the Raptor steadily climbs upward. It’s brilliant.
The Raptor’s not-comically-huge size means it can pick paths and go places the specially prepped F-150 Raptor — that led us up and down the peak — can’t. While the F-150 was forced to put the bash in its bash plates between boulders, the Ranger could shimmy over and pick an easier path and manoeuvre around tighter confines much more easily. This isn’t to say the Ranger Raptor was all designed to avoid taking a beating, as I saw a few of these things take a number of good hits and shrug them off like nothing happened. It can handle it all without breaking a sweat, and goes out of its way to make it look and feel easy.
For all this boulder-bashing and desert dynamism, the Ranger Raptor is more than capable on road as well. The same attributes that make the standard Ranger ride and drive so well are only amplified by the high tech hardware; it’s fun to toss around, then settle down into a perfectly normal, quiet truck that just happens to handle bad pavement exceedingly well. The Raptor also receives the same new niceties and quality-of-life updates that make the standard Ranger such a sweet truck.
The icing on the cake is the pricing. Starting at $77,945, Ranger Raptors all come pretty loaded, with the only real options being paint and beadlock-capable wheels. It’s considerably less dear than its siblings while being much easier to live with, and seemingly just as capable as either of them. Moreover, you couldn’t even come close to building anything like this yourself for the price delta between this and a base Ranger. The engine and transmission alone would swallow that difference, not to mention the totally different frame, electronically locking differentials, 33-inch BFGoodrich K03 tires, Fox dampers, and all the computing wizardry that makes all this happen.
For that money, the 2024 Ford Ranger Raptor is a custom trophy truck. It’s built by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, it was shaped by the Australian outback and honed by soaring across it, it will happily drive home after playing in the dirt, and does it all with the slick execution and peace of mind you’d expect from a factory rig. Nicely done.
