We Look under the 2024 Ford Ranger Raptor and Test Its Suspension

Ford has sold Raptor pickups for about 15 years, but the truck you’re probably thinking of is a raucous monster that’s a wide-stance version of the full-size F-150. They’re impressive trucks, and they’re so wide they require clearance lights. They’re also broad enough that they’ve been shunned by off-roaders that do any sort of trail work on the kinds of goat trails that are lined with brush that’s just waiting to scratch “desert stripe” into the paint of passing vehicles. Rock- or tree-lined trails can sometimes be too narrow to squeeze through at all, in some places, and even when they’re passable the Raptor’s wide stance can limit a driver’s options when it’s time to choose a line to dodge obstacles. They’re also hard to park within the painted lines at Home Depot and can rub the curbs at the local drive-through.

Join us as we take a close look at this right-sized Raptor’s suspension and see how well it articulates on our RTI ramp.

Ford has had a Ranger on and off through the years, but its pitiful FX4 package was really just stickers and, well, not a lot more. They had nothing to go up against the Tacoma TRD Off-Road that debuted in the mid-’90s, and the Ranger was discontinued entirely by the time the Tacoma TRD Pro came into being. Chevrolet sold a wide-stance S-10 ZR2 with off-road optimized suspension back in the Ranger’s glory days, but Ford never responded. Chevy brought the ZR2 back in 2017, and then redesigned it again for 2023. Meanwhile, the Ranger’s return to these shores in 2019 gave us nothing more off-roady than the old FX4 formula, which was especially irksome because other world markets got a wide-stance Ranger Raptor.

Today, we finally got the Ranger Raptor we’ve deserved for some time. It’s a right-sized Raptor that might just catch the eye of overlanders and people who actually go out into the bush. It’s 6.8 inches narrower than the big Raptor at the fender flares, and the difference is even more stark from mirror tip to mirror tip, where the Ranger Raptor is a full 9.3 inches skinnier than the big guy. Meanwhile the junior Raptor’s twin-turbo 3.0 V-6 makes 405 horsepower and 430 pound-feet of torque, which is enough to make the Ranger Raptor as quick as its big brother—as long as we’re not talking Raptor R.

But we’re here to see the chassis, and here the Ranger Raptor is mighty impressive. Its wide-stance suspension has Fox Live Valve shocks with variable compression damping, and the rear ones have remote reservoirs for extra cooling. But the big news is the coil-sprung rear axle, which is unique to the Ranger Raptor (regular Rangers have rear leaf springs). Four trailing links hold the axle in position, while the coil springs are mounted coil-over style around the rear dampers. The axle is not located laterally by the usual Panhard bar, because of the Ford Australia engineering team that took the lead on chassis development went with a Watts linkage, just like the forbidden-fruit first-generation Ranger Raptor that was never sent here.

What does it all look like? How does it perform on the RTI ramp? Check out the video to find out.