The Ford F-150 Raptor R Has Less Suspension Flex Than The Ram TRX. Here's Why | Suspension Test

I'm Dan Edmonds and frankly I've been talking like a pirate all week because I have a 2023 Ford Raptor R. What does the R stand for? More power. A supercharger. In fact, that all works out to 700 horsepower from this supercharged V8 engine that they've got up here. The suspension is largely the same except for some changes up front that are pretty much invisible that support the extra weight of this motor. The other thing you'll notice is the 37-inch wheels and tires that are optional on a regular Raptor. They're standard here. Anyway, let's get to it. Let's get this thing up in the air and see what it looks like. Of course, the graphics are pretty over the top. You can see all the eights in here. You're going, what's with all the eights? And you keep looking and then eventually you get to this right here. Oh, I get it. It's got a V8. All right, here what we can see pretty easily is a dual control arm setup with a steel upper control arm and an aluminum lower control arm and then the knuckle in between that holds the hub and everything. That's also aluminum. So there's the lower mounting of the Fox live valve shock which has the coilover spring and then up here is a bump stop in between the coils right here. Now what's going on is this is probably stiffer to account for the extra weight of the V8. It's not necessarily something you'd notice as a stiffer ride because basically what they're trying to do is make the natural frequency of the system the same despite the extra weight. Here we see a sensor and a little strut that's mounted to the upper control arm and that's there to measure the position and speed of the suspension so that the Fox live valve shocks can be best adjusted to suit conditions. Here on the back in a position we couldn't see from the side is the actual live valve that's controlled by this wire. Here we can get an idea of the motion ratio. So we have our inner pivot here and our outer ball joint here and of course this is the spring and shock mounting point and that is probably about 75% of the way out from here to here. So I'm calling this about a 0.75 give or take motion ratio, a little slight percentage deduction for the lean angle, not a lot but some. As for the stabilizer bar, well it's in the back kind of hidden by the shock but it it's about in this position and so that actually looks like less than 50%. The halfway point is pretty much where this first stiffening member is so it's more like a 0.4 motion ratio for the stabilizer bar. That means the bar would have to be beefier to compensate for that and that you know means more weight so it's nice if you have a bigger motion ratio because a smaller bar will be more effective. Of course then you can see this stiffening member along with this one makes this fairly open design pretty rigid. The other thing to notice is this little nub and this little v and if this was at full right lock this would make contact in here somewhere depending on where the suspension was and its travel and so it's a mechanical stop to make sure that the steering rack itself doesn't see any stress at full lock. Moving to the back we can see the stabilizer bar mounts to the frame in this bushing here loops up and then connects to the lower control arm about midway along its length and then of course we have the brakes dual piston sliding calipers. The two pistons are on the back and you can see the sliding mechanism here and then these are ventilated rotors. Well that's about it here at the front. I'm going to wrestle this baby back on here and move to the back. I don't have a weight for these because my scale is busted frankly but I did measure one when I had a regular Raptor with 37 inch tires in so it's the same setup so I'll just put that number on the screen. Anyway these are 37 by 12.5 R17s. Once you get above a certain size they do away with metric so it's really 37 inches tall 12 and a half inches wide 17 inches rim but what's easier than that? Well here's the Raptor's rear suspension and yeah that makes three for Ford now. There's leaf springs in the back of the regular F-150. The lightning is independent and completely different from that and then of course now we have this coil spring two trailing arms. Yeah it's a five link because there's two of these on each side for four and then one panhard rod or track rod to keep it from moving side to side so five links. As you can see the two longitudinal links are very long and the lower one is even longer than the upper one. You know it looks a little staggered here but it's even more staggered there and the reason why that one's longer than the one on the top is as it moves through its arc that keeps the nose of the diff and the angle of the u-joint in a good relationship with the other u-joint at the back of the transmission. This is a dual rate rear spring. You can see that the initial rate has already gone solid here because we're not at full droop. We're pretty compressed because I've set the weight of the vehicle on a jack stand here so it's it's even more compressed than it would be if it was sitting on the ground normally. At full droop like if you go off a jump this opens up and then what you get is a progressive engagement from soft to hard as these coils engage and then these start to engage. So the rear shocks because of the coil springs are not staggered opposite ways on both sides of the truck. Both sides lean forward and that's something you can do when you have upper and lower links and a panhard rod. Basically that's one of the advantages of a coil spring suspension is you can get this top mount of the shock closer to the middle of the frame where the stiffness is higher and also this is an inverted shock so the body is here and the shaft is below. It's covered by this plastic cover so that mud and rocks like the mud I drove through a couple days ago don't scratch up the exposed rod and also that reduces unsprung mass because this is bolted to the frame side does not count as unsprung. The unsprung part is this plastic guard and the shaft below that it's hiding. Another thing that's hard to do up front but easy to do in the rear is have a remote reservoir and so what's going on is the oil is all the way through here to about this point and somewhere in the middle here is a piston and then the gas is on this side and so that gives you more oil for one which helps reduce fade and it also allows it to cool better because this part is not in the you know subject to piston movement so there's more surface area to cool the oil as well and then of course the live valve is piggybacked on here and it operates in this little passage that connects the oil in here to the oil in the main part of the shock. The rear suspension has two bump stops per side. There's this urethane one that's really obvious that makes contact with the top of the axle tube just behind these brackets but then there's another one at the end of the shock so this one here you can barely see it's underneath this plastic guard the the shaft is right here and this is where it bolts to the axle yeah there's the bolt and this works with the one we saw that touches the top of the axle tube to cushion the extreme ends of compression travel. Interesting thing about these lower spring seats here is they bolt on so theoretically they can change the orientation and the position of the rear spring seat which gives you more options when tuning the suspension and it probably gives the aftermarket more options when they want to make lift kits so it's not often that you see a bolt-on lower spring seat on a rear axle usually there's one and that's it. So this is the Fifth Link the panhard rod and its job is to prevent the axle from moving left and right at all times in cornering and everything and the thing about it is you really would like this to have as much length as possible and unfortunately because the coil springs are right here this is inboard somewhat and this is a relatively short panhard bar so the axle will kind of translate left and right a little bit as it goes from full bump to full droop and you know you'd like to have it oh at least a foot longer than this if you could but you can't because of where the coil springs are right here so it's just a packaging issue and you can see in the middle here how close it is to the tire and right in there it's been flattened which doesn't really affect its strength because it's only compression and tension there's no bending loads in it but yeah that just shows you how close the 37 inch tire is to the panhard bar and if that little smashed section in the middle wasn't there probably wouldn't be able to offer 37s. Here's something interesting a lot of off-road trucks have this and that's this breather tube which vents gases out of the rear end and if you want to be able to have any kind of stream crossing ability you need to put a tube on it like this instead of have just a cap right here like some older trucks had so this tube and the height of its outlet determines what the fording depth is at least at the rear so let's we can figure out where it goes it's kind of like lost behind the fuel tank and it's up above the fuel tank and the shock mount this is it right here and here's the end of it you can see it's got a little valve up in there so really the fording depth is about right there based on where the outlet is for the rear axle vent now i don't know about the front or the engine or anything else but at least at the rear that's what it's working with that's the limit well that about wraps up this close-up look at the front and rear suspension of the ford raptor r i'm going to put this big old tire back on and tighten everything up and head into the back where i have my rti ramp yes we're going to measure the flex of the raptor r and see how it compares to a regular raptor with 35 inch tires and a regular raptor with the same 37 inch tires and wheels that this r has so you don't want to miss that i don't even know i am doing this shot because there's obviously no shortage of clearance up here this is a 20 degree ramp and this is a lot more approach angle especially right here outside the skid plate where the tire is i'm going to call it right here here's this piece of paper it touches the tire i can lift it up push it in it's touching enough to hold it there but i can pull it out so that's pretty darn close and now the measurement that lines up with the center of the hub i will mark that here with tape and now see how high that is off the ground 26 and an eighth i'll write that right here now i'm going to divide that by the sine of 20 and i get 76.38 all right so the wheelbase is 145.4 so i'll take 76.38 and divide it by 145.4 and i get that number i multiply it by a thousand to turn it into an rti score and it's 525 points so here's what this looks like compared to other raptors i've tested and of course the trx trx still out in front with 602 the non-r raptor with its standard 35 inch tires 559 with 37 inch tires that drops to 537 why is that well that's because they restrict the travel so the big tires will fit into the fender wells but here the raptor r 525 not much less but a little bit so why is that well they say this has stiffer front springs because the engine weighs more and that makes sense with respect to this score because if you have stiffer front springs it's not quite going to flex as readily not a big difference and we don't see a big numerical difference here either anyway what about this versus a trx because really this is where the 700 horsepower and the 703 horsepower that's the matchup yeah that's a bigger difference but i have to say that driving this off-road this thing just has such a really well-tuned suspension i think i like the way the suspension works off-road better than the trx so you know that's where i'm at there's yeah this has got a bigger number i think uh the raptors uh have a more um well-tuned suspension that really is uh really good at high speed off-road that's not to say the ram 1500 trx isn't but i think this is better off-road and on-road it's a better daily believe it or not if you can afford to put gas in it