How to get your Ford Ranger Raptor properly stuck in the mud
The solution was as clear as mud. Here I was with a Ford Ranger Raptor on its belly in a swamp unable to move a centimetre, and having a deep ponder about how life can blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday, as the Baz Luhrmann song Sunscreen goes.
Before this somewhat embarrassing incident I'd previously driven the second-generation Raptor in various off-road playgrounds including rocky trails and Namibian sand dunes, and the burly 4x4 had felt near invincible in tackling them. It's Ford's most off-road-focused bakkie with a towering ground clearance, fat all-terrain tyres, fancy position-sensitive Fox suspension and every traction-enhancing trick you can think of.
And it's got a belter of a V6 turbo petrol engine. Tested with a V box, the big bakkie soared from 0-100km/h in a hot hatch-like 6.7 seconds, making it the quickest bakkie we've yet tested by quite a margin.
Back to our swamp quandary. I hadn't intended to go off-roading that particular evening while on a camping trip. I was making an innocuous U-turn on a gravel road in the campsite, and as my arc took me into a veld the Raptor suddenly bogged down in a swamp hidden in the grass. Just bad luck. A few metres away cars were parked in the same veld on solid ground.
I engaged 4x4, low range and Mud mode. I wrenched the steering from side to side to try to gain extra traction as I pressed the throttle. Nothing. The Ford did as it was designed and all four wheels were turning with the front and rear differentials locked, but there was zero traction. The quagmire was so slippery the bakkie was going nowhere.
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