2010 Ford Raptor Race-Bred 4WD Pickup
2010 Ford F-150 Raptor 1st to visit Redding
What a treat to come in to the dealership today and have a Ford Raptor and a trainer from Ford visiting Redding for a product demonstration! After reviewing the product enhancements that make this F-150 the meanest baddest 4×4 on the road we had to take some photos to show our customers.
We are eagerly anticipating the Raptors arrival for sale in Redding. If you want to be notified when one arrives please email me. mark@crownmotorsredding.com
Below is some facts about the Raptor recently written by poplar mechanics.
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 SpecsAltogether 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.
