Beginning with its inception in 2010, Ford’s most souped-up version of their classic F-150 pickup, the Raptor, has been nearly synonymous with American muscle trucks: big displacement and big power numbers out of a time-tested, crossplane V8. Following a facelift in 2017, that big V8 was replaced by Ford’s newest golden child, a high-performance variant of their 3.5L twin-turbo EcoBoost. While the EcoBoost (which is so beloved by Ford that they chose it as the power plant for their new Ford GT supercar) is undeniably a great engine for any application, especially behind the new 10-speed automatic transmission, many would say the ol’ Raptor just isn’t the same without its big V8 powering it across the bajadas. It’s perhaps possible, then, that the V8’s absence was always intended to be temporary while Ford worked through the embryonic stages of its most powerful Raptor ever – the brand-new Raptor R which