Riding Shotgun with Ken Block in the Ford F-150 RaptorTRAX [w/ Video]

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Last month, Ken Block had a few rare days off between his return from London, where he’d been working on the next version of the video game Need for Speed, and a trip to New Zealand, where he was taking his rally team for the year’s first race. (Why New Zealand? Mostly because he loves that country’s roads. “They’re some of the best in the world,” he explained.) Block was at the wheel of his daily driver, a matte black Ford F-150 SVT Raptor, en route to Powder Mountain in Utah, the state in which Block lives; he’d agreed to spend a day there tearing up a closed ski resort in the world’s angriest snow vehicle, the Hoonigan Racing F-150 RaptorTRAX.

This wasn’t just any ride; it was his last chance of the winter to shred some snow, and probably, he thought, the last time he’d drive the RaptorTRAX at all, since he and his engineering team were already sketching out plans for version 2.0, based around the next-gen aluminum-bodied Raptor coming for 2017.

The original RaptorTRAX was first glimpsed nearly a year and a half ago, tearing around a field across from the headquarters of Block’s Hoonigan Racing Team, outside Park City, but its real coming-out party was at Baldface, a backcountry ski resort in the mountains of British Columbia.

There, Block drove the modified pickup truck up and down hills covered in chest-deep snow. And when the video of the truck, and the snowboards that chased it (and jumped over it) hit almost every screen in the world, among those who took notice was Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton. Block ran into Hamilton at an event on Barbados later in the year, and Baldface was all Hamilton—an avid snowboarder—wanted to talk about. Last Christmas, Block took him there, which is how pictures like this happened.

Actually, Block said, Hamilton had been on him already to do a helicopter skiing trip. “The funny thing is, he’s like, ‘I want to wear the backpack! You know, like, the safety backpack?’ That, to him, is an adventure. He’s such an English motorsports kid.”

Baldface uses Sno-Cats and not helicopters, but it’s true backcountry, and Hamilton got his chance to wear the safety pack, with the shovel and probe. “I don’t know if I should tell you this but I’ll tell you anyway,” Block said, with a smirk. “I have video of him doing backflips and landing on his head.” Block promised Hamilton he’d never share the videos, but the situation wasn’t even remotely hairy, he said.

The flip attempts were in deep powder. And unlike Block, Hamilton rides in a helmet. “ He did it like six times and finally landed one. Which I give him credit for—I wouldn’t do it. He kept doing it ’til he got it.”

Back to the RaptorTRAX. Here’s Block’s version of how he came to own the world’s only super-truck on snow: “I’m always trying to find ways to get in the backcountry to snowboard, and do it in a fun way. Helicopters are expensive. Sno-Cats are slow. Snowmobiles are fun, but you can’t take your friends.” He had the Mattracks treads sitting around from an old project with Subaru, and when Ford offered up a Raptor show truck with a built-in roll cage and supercharger, Block saw an opportunity. ”That was kind of the impetus behind making it—to create something fun and different and faster than a Sno-Cat.”

At Powder Mountain, Block hopped into the cab and immediately punched the throttle, ripping past a small lodge and over the crest of a hill. He actually hadn’t driven the RaptorTRAX since Baldface and was clearly enjoying the opportunity to do things that should not be possible in a 9000-pound truck.

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He was already thinking of the next iteration, which he said needed to have more traction—in the form of bigger, probably custom, Mattracks—and, of course, more power. That should be easier on the new aluminum Raptor, which is likely to be several hundred pounds lighter right off the bat. Not that Block is complaining about the current version. “The concept itself works and works quite well,” he said. “It just doesn’t work at the perfect level yet.”

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