Men's Journal

Bright orange paint, massive knobby tires, and a suspension designed for getting big air off sand dunes: The Ford F-150 SVT Raptor is built from every little boy’s dreams.

by Ezra Dyer

I swerve off Route 78 in California, somewhere in the armpit of the Arizona-Mexico border, and steer straight for a corduroy mess of motocross whoops adjacent to the Glamis sand dunes. The Ford pickup cheerfully bounds across the terrain, its 35-inch tires cycling up and down like Jonny Moseley’s legs on a mogul run. While the horizon frantically oscillates between dirt and sky beyond the edge of the hood, the springs never bottom out, and the skid plates under the front bumper never smack the sand. This is a playground meant for purpose-built dirt bikes and dune buggies, yet I’m behind the wheel of a 5,863-pound truck that anyone can drive right off a dealer’s lot.

That’s the strange genius of the F-150 SVT Raptor. SVT stands for Special Vehicle Team, and the Ford’s performance skunk works endowed the Raptor with 11.2 inches of suspension travel up front and more than a foot at the rear. The fenders are seven inches wider than a stock F-150’s to accommodate those fat tires. Fox Racing Shox, a company far better at building suspension parts than spelling, provides long-travel shock absorbers that might have been stolen off an unlimited-class Baja dune buggy. Add it all up, and you’ve got a truck that sees Priuses as speed bumps.

Which is why I’ve taken the Raptor to Glamis (despite the Ford PR guy’s request that I stick to the roads). This isn’t a vehicle for narrow, technical forest trails. (Hell, it barely fits in parking garages; I could hear its antenna high-fiving every overhead beam as an attendant brought it to me.) This is a truck for the wide-open West, and Glamis is about the most lawless place you’ll find north of Mexico, its speed limit delineated by the Bureau of Land Management as “no faster than is safe for conditions.” The Raptor’s top speed is 100 mph, so there’s my real answer.

When I first arrived, I stopped at the edge of the hardpack to prepare the Raptor for some proper sand slinging. There’s a button on the console marked off-road mode that supposedly tweaks throttle response and shifting for tearing across Mother Nature’s face. But what kind of off-roading are we talking about? Blasting through the dunes requires aggressive throttle response and shift points, while rock crawling calls for slow-and-steady inputs. That’s why Land Rover’s Terrain Response System asks you to specify whether you’re on the Rubicon Trail or crossing the Sahara Desert. No such options here, so I just manually select four-wheel drive, deactivate the stability control, and lock the rear differential. Hi-ho Silver, away!

I quickly find that the Raptor has more balls than I do. On a weekend this place would be crawling with 4x4s and ATVs, but on a Tuesday afternoon, I’m the only soul in sight. With the ambient temperature at 105 degrees, driving into a sand bowl and getting trapped would make for a drier version of Open Water. At one point, I stop the truck while facing downhill and get out to survey the scene. The sand is so fine that I sink in up to my knees, and as I try to extricate myself, my flip-flops are sucked off my feet. How am I driving across a surface that I can’t even walk on? Bravo, Ford.

That said, the Raptor isn’t the second coming of Bigfoot. I avoid the steepest hills because true dune climbing demands major horsepower — sand propelled rearward equals forward motion — and the Raptor has fewer ponies on tap than the excessive body decals would lead you to believe. It comes with a garden-variety 5.4-liter, 320-horsepower V-8 from the regular F-150, coupled to a six-speed automatic transmission with gear ratios chosen for fuel economy instead of acceleration. There’s a Grand Canyon gap between first and second gears and another gulf between second and third, so the Raptor, which needs all the power its engine can muster, keeps falling out of its sweet spot.

Ford isn’t going to build a special transmission for a limited-production truck like the Raptor, since using common parts is what lets them sell it for a surprisingly reasonable $38,995. The good news: If prospective Raptor owners looking to summit Mount Ararat can wait until early next year, Ford will gladly let them pay an extra $3,000 for a version with the new 6.2-liter, 400-horsepower V-8.

But outright power isn’t really the point here. The Raptor is designed to blast across the desert at highway speeds, and that it does. In fact, it may as well have been named Tigger, because Ford’s off-roader simply bounces its way through the world, oblivious to its own outlandishness. A major car manufacturer building a production truck for desert racers is like Microsoft developing a version of Office specifically optimized for astronauts — I’m not sure why they did it, but it sure is cool that they did.

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This article originally appeared in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.