Ford's 2010 F-150 SVT Raptor simply looks ferocious. With its swollen flanks, carved-in headlights and taillights, aggressive stance, visibly rugged suspension pieces and thumping 35-inch-tall BFGoodrich off-road tires, this nearly 3-ton, four-wheel-drive pickup is brutally gorgeous. It looks tough enough to run straight down the Baja Peninsula at full speed, jump across the Gulf of California, invade the Mexican mainland and then continue rampaging down through South America until it plowed over Antarctica and started up north across Africa. With that much visual firepower, the obvious question is this: Does the substance match the style? Let's find out.
SVT Gets Dirty
The Special Vehicle Team (SVT) has been Ford's hardcore performance division for nearly 17 years and gets credit for delectable road machines ranging from the 2002-to-2004 SVT Focus to the current GT 500 version of the Mustang (yeah, it did the Ford GT too). But until now, its concentration has been on pavement-based ability. And after two successful generations of the F-150-based SVT Lightning performance street truck, there was every reason for the team to do a third one. But the 2WD sporty truck market is a fickle one. And so this time SVT turned to high-speed, Baja 1000-style, off-road desert racing for inspiration. In particular they looked at "prerunner" trucks used by race teams to scout courses. The pre-runner look is jacked up, hogged out and explicitly mechanical. And that's a function of what a prerunner is asked to do: skitter along the desert at high speed with its suspension soaking up ruts and the occasional armadillo strike without slowing. So SVT decided to concentrate on the F-150's suspension and produce the most capable desert truck possible—while retaining civilized on-road manners and the necessary utility.
The Specs
To build the Raptor, SVT started with the 133-inch-wheelbase F-150 extended SuperCab 4x4 equipped with a 5.5-foot cargo box. Most of the Raptor is still pure F-150. The basic ladder frame is the same, the cab's structure and sheet metal is untouched, the 320hp 5.4-liter SOHC 24-valve V8 is unchanged, and the six-speed automatic transmission behind it hasn't been modified. Even the suspension pickup points (where the suspension pieces bolt to the frame) are the same as any other F-150's. But beyond that, the Raptor is as different from an F-150 as, well, a velociraptor is from a brachiosaurus.
Suspension travel is to a prerunner what horsepower is to a drag racer. That is, everything. And since the suspension pickup points were already in place, SVT decided the most effective way to gain travel was to increase track width by making the suspension links and control arms longer. So up front, SVT developed new cast-aluminum upper and lower control arms, added their own longer springs and equipped the Raptor with specially developed FOX Racing shock absorbers. The solid rear axle has been beefed up and widened, its center stuffed with short 4.10:1 gears and fitted with SVT-developed leaf springs, and it's damped by a pair of stupendously cool-looking FOX Racing remote reservoir shocks. Finishing the suspension package is a set of special 17-inch cast-aluminum wheels wrapped in those 35-inch-tall BFGoodrich LT315/70R17 All Terrain tires. Do the math: A 35-inch-tall tire on a 17-inch wheel means there's a full 9 inches of super-squishy sidewall to swallow up rocks and crud.
Altogether the Raptor's track width is up 7 full inches, and that allows the front suspension to travel 11.2 inches (total rebound and compression) while the rear can move 12.1. In fact, the Raptor is so wide that it's legally required to run with amber marker lights to demarcate its breadth. For this, SVT has cleverly integrated the appropriate LEDs into the front grille and across the tail.
SVT has kept most of these new suspension pieces visible to anyone looking even casually at the Raptor. Wise move, because as tough as these new components seem to be, they look wicked too. The control arms are perfect castings that could be mistaken for an F/A-18's landing gear, the shock bodies are polished aluminum and the diameter of the biggest branch on a redwood, and the wheel-and-tire package has the savage purposefulness of a bear's claw. There's an argument to be made that the only way to make the new Raptor tougher-looking would be to strip off its body entirely.
To cover the additional width, all the bodywork forward of the cab's firewall is new, and the cargo box gets its own set of flared fenders as well. Viewed from above, the Raptor has a Rubenesque hourglass figure with a healthy chest and seductively plump hips. From the ground it just looks awesome with open wheel wells, functional hood and fender vents, ready-to-pounce stance and a grille big enough to consume an entire Golden Corral buffet in a single gulp. The Raptor is an almost freakishly attractive pickup—the Megan Fox of half-ton trucks.
