British YouTuber Takes to the Skies in Ranger Raptor Trail Ride
Out in the hills near Cologne, Germany, the Ranger Raptor is the right-sized Raptor for off-road kicks.
Though we’ve spent about a year enjoying all the new Ranger has to offer, there is one model we’re still hoping will come over to the United States: the Ranger Raptor. All of the madness of the desert-destroying F-150 Raptor, condensed into still-beefy midsize package. Imagine beating the pants off all of the other midsize trucks with such a machine!
Well, imagining is all we can do until Ford decides to finally give us the little prerunner. For now, we’ll have to live through auto vlogger Becky “Queen B” Evans, who recently crossed the English Channel to experience all the Ranger Raptor has to offer on the countryside near Cologne, Germany.
“Good morning, everyone! You join me in Cologne, where I am currently in the new Ford Ranger Raptor, watching people around me doing a really bad job at driving them out of the car-parking space.” Evans says.
Evans is already a fan of Rangers, as her father bought one after importing F-150s from the United States, a monster of a truck dominating the English countryside, to say the least. It’s also her first time off-roading a truck, and she’s going so with her companion for the ride, Paul Wallace.
“Let’s take a walk ’round the 2019 Ranger Raptor,” says Evans. “This is a two-liter diesel, 213 brake [horsepower], [369 lb-ft] of torque. When I first got it, I was like ‘213 brake? That seems low.’ But actually, for what you want to be able to do in this thing, it’s perfect, because it’s got plenty of grunt for when you’re sort of going uphill, downhill. They also say that it can do 100-mile an hour off-road. To be fair, if I have one of these things, it’s basically for [posing] and driving over people.”
“I think that there are a lot of cool modified Ford Rangers out there,” said Wallace. “A lot of companies are offering a lot of aftermarket options. I just don’t think the aftermarket companies have gone to this much thought on making it perform as well as it does. I think a lot of them were aesthetic changes, whereas this is aesthetically more rounded, and also more hardcore.”
After some time rolling through the planned path, Evans and Wallace took the Ranger Raptor into the sky with a light hill jump at speed. Evans is impressed with how “well-balanced and planted” the midsize pickup is, that landings aren’t as brutal as they would on a hardcore trophy truck. The jump also leaves the duo in stitches (of the fun kind), just because of how crazy it can be.
“I would buy one,” Wallace said. “This is obviously the complete package, and it looks the best, I think, even though there are some crazy aftermarket Rangers out there. I love how OEM-plus it looks. It really does sort of capture the Raptor’s characteristics, and put them in a Ranger, which, for our roads, is better than a Raptor.”
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