By Chuck Yarbrough

Addiction Raptor Specs and Setup

To start, I want to make it abundantly clear that my truck, which I bought new in 2019, has been through a variety of upgrades and it is now a highly modified Raptor. When I decided to go wide with the “Addiction Raptor,” I honestly had no intention of going up to 40s. My plan was to stick with the very capable 39” BFG K02s.

Then an opportunity to test out a set of true 40” Yokohamas came up and I jumped at the chance. Now, the truck has what SVC calls their mid-travel setup and I’m running 3.5” bypasses on leaf springs in the back. When we built this truck, we chose the FiberwerX Deberti fenders, knowing we would really want 39s to make it look and work well. Now, one of the knocks on the BFG K02/K03 tires has always been they’re small for their size. They aren’t true 39s. Fine with me. They worked great.

A true 40x13.50R17 Yokohama GEOLANDAR M/T G003, fresh off the rack.

Now let’s talk about the Yokohama GEOLANDAR M/T G003. They’re aggressive. They have the look of a serious mud terrain tire. Not the kind of tire I typically run on my Raptor. For the most part, the only tires I have run on my Raptor are K02s, starting with 35” then with some basic upgrades I went to 37”. Those worked very well. I did test another tire for a while (a hybrid all terrain/highway tire) from another manufacturer that I really didn’t like on the Raptor. However, I loved that tire on the Bronco. But that’s another story. So, when I went mid travel, the truck needed a bigger tire. The 39 BFGs worked very well.

Putting true 40s on the truck changed things up more than I expected. The truck felt bigger, I think it looks bigger, and, I hate to say it, I do get some rubbing on the fronts. But only when really charging hard into a g-out. I’m hoping that we’ll have a solution for that when I have the shocks rebuilt. It’s not a huge amount of rubbing, but it’s there.

Chuck Yarbrough with the Addiction Raptor's new Yokohamas.

Once I got the tires mounted, I had to spend a few days working at Ford’s Bronco Off-Roadeo in Moab. The first simple test besides driving home from the tire shop was to drive the highway down to Moab. What I kept waiting for was the noise. But it never came. The tires aren’t noisy. They look like they should be, but they’re not. They’re impressively quiet.

“The tires aren’t noisy...They’re impressively quiet.”

Chuck Yarbrough

In Moab, most of the time was instructing customers on driving Broncos, but I did get a few minutes to play around on some rocks. As I expected, they gripped quite well. I wasn’t aired down much and certainly would have aired down more had I been able to spend more time on those trails. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come away with any photos or videos, but my real goal was to test these tires under the most brutal terrain I know of: Baja.

So, Friday night after working all day at Bronco Off-Roadeo, I hopped in the Raptor and drove about 400 miles of mostly interstate to Mesquite, NV where I was able to find a low-cost hotel and catch some much-needed sleep. In the morning, I picked up where I left off and headed towards the border south of San Diego. I made it through the border in pretty good time, then jumped on Hwy 1 down the coast to Ensenada. The group I was planning on running some new trails with were already on their way to San Quintin, so I kept driving a few more hours and pulled into the Mision Santa Maria hotel just before dark. Now this is a lot of highway driving, and I’m here to tell you, these tires were amazing. Quiet and comfortable. I was running about 40 psi in the front tires and 38 in the rear. The one place the tires felt different than what I was used to was in very slow rolling. Like less than 5 miles an hour I could feel the lugs moving on the ground. This was a little disconcerting at first, however, once at speed I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary.

The next morning, we did some fun off-roading down on our way to San Ignacio. The route took us back out to the coast from Hwy 1. This was the first real opportunity to get a feel for how the tires worked. I wasn’t too sure where to set the air pressure, so I was conservative and went down to 28 in all 4 tires. This was not low enough for some of the rough terrain. And with the speeds and the ambient temps, the tire pressure built back up way more than I had expected. I dropped the pressure down to 25 and that seemed a bit better. As you’d expect, we encountered some very rough terrain and that was magnified through the tires. I would have liked to spend more time playing with air pressures to figure out the best overall for those conditions. I will do exactly that in the future.

The next day we left San Ignacio on some newer routes that were very rough, but super fun. Really a good mix of fast and fun and rough and slower. A quick stop at the Mision de San Francisco de Borja, and then onto Bay of LA. The next day was a blast heading north with a lunch and swim stop at Gonzaga Bay. This gave me an opportunity to try out wet traction. Unfortunately, the king tide got high as we exited the area. Fun times for sure, but I cringed at the salt water under the truck. From there, we booked it up to San Felipe.

Kicking up dust and water on the run north.

So, with a few solid off-road days across the Baja Peninsula, the Yokohama tires delivered what I would call, a major victory. No flats, no tire issues (other than figuring out tire pressures) and this very important thing called traction. I’ll figure out the pressures that work best. There’s always a little learning curve with new tires. It’ll take a bit of practice and playing around before I know how the tires react.

Here are my initial impressions after the Baja trip:

I realize the above impressions can be a bit vague in terms of what each of those means. For example, what is durability? In this case, it was the fact that I came back from Baja with tires that looked almost new. Yes, they had wear on them, but nothing significant. Same with Chunking Resistance. When I got home, there weren’t any big chunks missing or even any tread issues I could see. So, no flats, no side wall tears, no tire issues at all. That was impressive.

The front tread after Baja. Some wear, no chunking.

My Final Thoughts on the Yokohama GEOLANDAR M/T G003

I really like these tires. I was surprised that such an aggressive looking mud terrain tire would work so well in serious Baja off-roading. Traction and wear were key points to me. The quiet ride on road just makes these aggressive tires even better. I was absolutely impressed.

Comparing these to the previous tires I had (the 39” BFG K02), I honestly felt that the traction was similar. This really surprised me. However, I do have more confidence in the BFG K02s when drifting. That isn’t meant to be a knock on the Yokohamas at all, simply I haven’t had enough experience with them in hard sliding turns to feel as confident. I can say that there were times where I waited for the truck to slide out, kick to the side or move in an awkward position, but those situations didn’t materialize. That impressed me a great deal.

So which tire is better? I’m not sure I can answer that yet. I need more time and further testing. Also, BFG recently released the KR3 in a similar sized DOT Baja tire that comes in 40s and I’d like to compare the Yokohama GEOLANDAR M/T G003 to those new BFG tires.