Even with this more enticing V6 petrol engine, the Ranger Raptor isn’t the most exciting fast road car. Part of the problem is - still - power. In other territories, it will have much closer to 400 horsepower, but because European-market emissions regulations peg its V6 back to just 288bhp, the Raptor makes a slightly suspicious amount of noise when you give it full power without really accelerating that hard.
The 10-speed automatic gearbox doesn’t help when you leave it to its own devices, often preferring to downshift a couple of times before getting on with the job at hand. Use manual mode instead and the car seems to come to heel better but, a bit disappointingly, the Raptor never really feels muscle-car fast. There's still a diesel this time, too, which we haven't tried, but it does without both the locking front differential and the fancy dampers, so is both slower and likely less precise to drive.
Given its size, that absence of lightning pace might be less of an issue in the UK than in some territories with broader roads. The Raptor's body is more than two metres wide and you can make that 2.2 metres-plus if you include the door mirrors. On your average British back road, then, given its height and girth it very much feels like a truck, albeit an astonishingly capable one.
It is remarkably well-damped. There’s none of the high-frequency fidget and fuss of your average live-axle pick-up’s ride with this one. Those clever dampers are super-progressive in their inital response and filter out the kind of inputs you might find on a B-road with the all disdain you’d expect from them. It steers well for such a big car, too, and handles with decent feel and precision - though not with the balance, grip or immediacy to satisfy a sports car or even super-saloon regular. It has all of the straight-line stability of lower cars, though, and because noise levels are low, plus leggy gearing spins the engine over at under 2000rpm at cruising speeds, it's a surprisingly good motorway car - albeit not a particularly economical one.
In short, like so many track-day specials when they’re driven on the road, the Ranger Raptor very much feels like it wants to be somewhere else. For UK drivers especially, it’s a niche proposition: it's amazing in its element, but when it’s not, it doesn’t entertain like a great driver’s car really ought to.