Payne: Truck or treat — the Ford Raptor R is a howling, V8-powered hellion

Silver Lake State Park — In the Peanuts holiday classic “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” Linus prepares for the appearance of the unseen title character. “On Halloween night, the Great Pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys for all the children,” explains Lucy’s blanket-bearing brother to a skeptical Charlie Brown.

It’s Halloween, and Linus’s dream is real.

But you’ll find the Great Pumpkin, not at a pumpkin patch, but at Off-Road Vehicle Parks like the 450-acre Silver Lake sandbox here on Lake Michigan. It’s ruled by the Code Orange-colored Ford Raptor R super-truck. With 700 horsepower, 37-inch tires, and 13-inch suspension travel, this is a 6,200-pound jack-o’-lantern full of off-road treats.

It can even fly. Truck or treat!

Nailing the throttle, I crested a sand dune at 50 mph and the Great Pumpkin flew 40 feet through the air, sticking the landing with the poise of Norwegian ski jump gold medalist Marius Lindvik. Credit the sophisticated live-valve Fox shocks in Raptor’s bag that allow this hellion to tackle Silver Lake’s challenging landscape.

R’s prize toy is the howling, supercharged V-8 under the hood. Yes, the eight is back. Raptor invented the super-truck segment in 2010 with its snarling, 6.2-liter V-8. Under attack from Washington’s Fun Police, the V-8 has become something of an endangered species. Before EPA prudes robbed Dodge enthusiasts of the Hellcat engine, the second-generation, 2017 Raptor pickup sacrificed its V-8 for a twin-turbo V-6.

The 450-horse six-holer is a treat, but you could still hear the Raptor faithful grumbling over its turbo-muffled exhaust. Ford didn’t forget about them — especially after Ram debuted its own supercharged, 702-horse V-8 supertruck, the 2021 TRX (pronounced T-rex). Thanks to shrewd EV ‘n’ hybrid product planning to satisfy regulators, Ford has saved the Mustang V-8 — and now the Raptor as well.

Ford expects 25% of Raptor sales to be R-rated.

Appropriately, the Blue Oval’s $100,00 supercar and supertruck share the same supercharged, 5.2-liter block forged by the mad scientists at Ford Performance. In the wicked Mustang GT500, it makes 760 horsepower and 625 pound-feet of torque; in the Raptor R, 700 horses/640 torque. One optimized for the track, one for off-road.

GURGURGURUGUR! went the Raptor R’s V-8 as it strained against my left foot holding the brake in launch control. That’s right, launch control in the sand — just as GT500 uses launch control on a drag stirp. Release the brake, release the Kraken — er, Pumpkin.

BWWWAAAAGGGHHH! The R exploded forward, slinging sand from here to Muskegon. Since R is meant to dig out of sand, its mill is focused on low-end torque, thus the tweaked engine specs compared to the Mustang (R dwarfs the 2010 Raptor V-8’s 411 horse and 434 torque numbers).

In Baja mode, the rapid-fire, 10-speed transmission fed that twist to four, aired-down, bead-locked 37s that disappeared over steep dunes in a cloud of sound and speed.

This is what V-8s are made for and the supercharged 5.2 is addictive. I bounded from one dune to another, my right foot feeding the V-8 to hear that glorious sound. Armored with skid plates and 13-inch ground clearance, Raptor R is a sledgehammer looking for nails. Silver Lake can’t compete with California’s epic, 85,000-acre Borrego Desert State Park, where you can sustain Raptor’s 112 mph top speed for long stretches.

But Silver Lake’s harrowing hills offer plenty of Halloween thrills, from Sunset Hill’s punishing whoops to the scary-fast flats section where we hit 70 mph. I got goosebumps. I got 5.5 mpg.

That mileage doubles on road for 430-mile gas range to get you to Silver Lake.

Buy a GT500 and join, say, the Shelby American Auto Club so you can track it at Grattan Raceway outside Grand Rapids to learn its extraordinary bandwidth. Raptor owners have similar outlets like the Raptor Junkies group, which organizes weekend getaways to Silver Lake and southern California’s Borrego Springs and Baja Peninsula. Or just find friends with Broncos, Wranglers, side-by-sides and other off-road toys, and head to the park.

Like a line of armored tanks heading into battle, our media group of 10 Raptor Rs departed a Muskegon hotel at the crack of dawn for the Dunes in appalling October weather. I say dawn because the clock said 7:15. But I’m pretty sure the sun slept in, so black was the sky, so torrential the rain.

Rather than complain, Raptor R took the opportunity to show off its enormous bandwidth. Aside from its menacing, Code Orange running lights and three marker lamps (because this truck is 87-inches wide, for goodness’ sake), black hood dome and V-8 mill, the R sits on the same bones as the V-6 Raptor. Ginormous 37-inch tires, Baja-tested Fox shocks, luxurious cabin, multiple drive modes, 12-inch touchscreen and five-link rear suspension.