Brad DeBerti has a problem most truck owners would kill for: 1,600 horsepower and nowhere to put it. His twin-turbo Ford F-150 Raptor R makes so much power that it became, in his own assessment, barely drivable. So he called BF Goodrich and asked for something the company has almost certainly never built before — a set of 39-inch racing slicks designed to fit a desert truck.
They said yes.
The result is one of the most absurd and wonderful contradictions in the current truck scene. A vehicle engineered from the factory to crawl over rocks, blast through sand washes, and soak up Baja-grade punishment is now sitting low on its suspension, wearing drag-strip rubber with zero tread. The Raptor R’s stock BF Goodrich All-Terrain T/A KO2s — as large as 37 inches — are designed to bite into loose surfaces. These slicks do the opposite: maximize the contact patch on smooth pavement so all that boost has somewhere to go.
DeBerti, a YouTuber and builder who thrives on exactly this kind of provocation, also lowered the truck. He knows Raptor purists will hate it. He also knows that outrage is currency on social media, and a slammed, slick-shod Raptor R generates plenty of both.
The build is engineered for the quarter mile, not the desert, and everything about it reflects that single-minded goal. This isn’t without precedent. Back in 2022, someone bolted slicks onto a Ram 1500 TRX — the Raptor R’s now-discontinued rival — and ran a 10.922-second quarter mile at 124 mph.
That truck was stock at 702 horsepower. DeBerti’s Raptor R makes more than twice that. The quarter-mile numbers, when they come, could be genuinely startling.
The deeper tension here is what trucks like the Raptor R have become versus what buyers actually do with them. Ford builds the Raptor R around a supercharged 5.2-liter V-8 making 720 horsepower from the factory, wraps it in off-road suspension, and prices it well north of $100,000. Most will never leave pavement.
The aftermarket knows this. That’s why the hottest builds right now aren’t about adding more suspension travel — they’re about drag strips, highway pulls, and clips of tire smoke. Ford killed the original F-150 Lightning — the street-performance truck — after the 2004 model year and never looked back. Ram axed the TRX in 2024.
Both companies decided the market wanted off-road theater over straight-line muscle. Builders like DeBerti are proving, loudly, that a significant audience disagrees. They want the big motor, the big truck, and the big slicks.
They want to go fast in a straight line and they don’t care if the fenders are caked in mud or not. BF Goodrich building a custom set of 39-inch slicks for a content creator’s Raptor R tells you everything about where the truck performance market is heading. The tire company makes its reputation on off-road credibility — KO2s are practically standard equipment for overlanders — but it clearly sees value in this space too.
When your customer has 1,600 horsepower and a camera crew, you find a way to make the rubber. DeBerti hasn’t posted quarter-mile times yet. But with that much power, proper traction, and a lowered center of gravity, the numbers should be violent.
A full-size pickup truck running deep into the nines — or lower — would put it in territory that embarrasses a lot of purpose-built sports cars. And it would do it while looking like nothing the Raptor’s engineers ever imagined.
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