Here’s How I Would Revive The Ford SHO As An 815-Horsepower GTD-Powered Explorer

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” I have an urge to slap people who use that phrase, even though I do understand and agree with the sentiment when life requires one to deal with crummy circumstances. With automobiles, it’s a bit of the same thing.

I recently posted about Ford’s last family muscle car, the Taurus SHO. I thought it might be a fun car to revive, but it quickly occurred to me that the Blue Oval brand no longer has any sedans (or even any “cars” besides the Mustang) upon which to apply the SHO treatment. Did that mean I was going to give up on the concept? No, it just meant that I had to find a different Taurus. Let me explain.

The Three-Box Ford Goes Into The Dust Bin

Like the Shogun dynasty of Japan in the late nineteenth century, the circumstances around the Taurus SHO changed to the point that they could no longer exist in the current world. It’s been thirty years ago since Ford had the best-selling car (as in not-truck, because I’m not counting the F-150 pickup) in America. The fish-faced Taurus ended Ford’s multi-year streak of winning that title, with Toyota’s Camry and Honda’s Accord taking the lead in the popular category. Who would have guessed that today, the Camry would be way down on the best-sellers list, the Accord not even in the top twenty, and the Taurus now living on only in history books? Certainly no one back in those heady days of

What is the equivalent of the old Taurus now? It’s got to be the Explorer, the modern-day top-selling Ford SUV. The current Explorer remains among the top twenty best-selling cars today, and has been consistently near the top since its 1991 debut.

A lot of new competitors from Japan and Korea have cut into the Explorer’s popularity, something that wasn’t helped by the Ford/Firestone tire tread separation disaster of the early 2000s that resulted in crashes that reportedly killed 271 people. Incidentally, the 1995-2003 Explorer was by far the most crushed car in the “Cash for Clunkers” program of 2009.

Still, the Explorer was the right car at the right time, and still is. Like the Taurus, it’s a mainstream family vehicle; in the Explorer’s case, it’s often the choice of people who really should get a minivan but can’t stomach the idea. Of course, it was never exactly a racy machine.

Ford didn’t try to alleviate that aspect of the Explorer, but at least Mustang tuner Steve Saleen did, modifying it as the XP8 with an available supercharged V8.

More importantly, Saleen tweaked the chassis to give this very limited production special some semblance of handling.

Thankfully, the Explorer of today is a much, much better car than the old Ranger-chassis early nineties models. Ford’s latest mid-size SUV might trail behind the likes of Toyota Highlanders or Hyundai Palisades in a number of categories, but the refreshed current model is packed with the latest technology and gets decent crash safety ratings. Better still, it offers decent performance and handling for the class with its all-around independent suspension.

The interior materials are now much better than some of the McDonald’s Happy Meal toy plastics of the Clinton era:

In the comments section of the post I wrote on the third-gen SHO, a few readers mentioned that Ford sort of has an Explorer-based SHO equivalent now: the ST. This one packs a twinturbocharged V6 with 400 horsepower, making it capable of zero to sixty times of around 5.5 seconds.

That’s pretty darn fast, I must say. Still, the SHO is supposed to be about shock and awe. We don’t want “pretty darn fast”, we want “terrifyingly fast”. How can we do that? Well, we need eight cylinders, and this is Ford, so we have some choices. Unlike back in ‘96, this time around, a V8 SHO is going to provide the kind of performance you’d expect from a V8 SHO.

Godzilla Ain’t Got Nothin’

At first, I considered the Godzilla V8 for this new SHO, but then it occurred to me that with that motor’s 430 horsepower output, it would be a mere 30 more than the twin turbo in the standard Explorer ST. That reminded me of how the third-generation SHO debuted with a V8 that had almost that exact measly advantage over the most powerful V6 in a rental car Taurus! That won’t work.

No, we’re going to go big or just go home. Let’s start with a motor out of the fearsome new Mustang GTD with a whopping 815 horsepower (I still think “diesel” when I hear “GTD” by the way). We might need to do some detuning to prevent it from ripping the poor Explorer to shreds. Also, I have no idea if it will clear the mechanicals for driving the front wheels, but we could possibly modify it to do so. Hell, just rip all of that out to make it rear wheel drive; with giant tires, it wouldn’t go anywhere in the snow anyway, even with all-wheel drive. I just want something that will embarrass the people who drive Cayenne Turbo GTs (like the one in my neighborhood that I get stuck behind because they drive below the speed limit, which makes perfect sense).

Lowered, stiffened suspension components in our new SHO will support massive, staggered wheels and tires; naturally, the standard bodywork won’t cover them, so we’ll need to fix that. And will we ever.

SHO The World Your Power

Historically, the SHO versions of the Taurus didn’t look that different from the standard sedans; this added a sort of sleeper quality to the famous Ford hot rod.

Unfortunately, trying to accommodate the huge rubber of my SHO Explorer and adding the needed breathing apparatus on the hood for the giant motor kind of negated that idea so I just leaned into the crazy. Let’s start with the stock product:

I’ve never liked the Explorer’s massive, blunt, tall front end, so that will change. The hard points mean we’ll have to keep the hood height where it is, but the headlights will drop down lower to make the whole thing look more hunkered down, and you can be sure that a first-generation Taurus-style oval grille opening will sit between them. Small black trim extensions under the beltline also attempt to visually reduce the height of the Explorer. A hood scoop for the mega-mill under the bonnet is shaped to simulate the one on another family Ford brawler: the legendary 1971 Torino GT.

We’ll add giant flared fenders that might even be fiberglass to reduce weight and eliminate the need to make new stamping dies for such a low-production vehicle. Plenty of wheel options out there, but those Lobo-style turbofan things I just can’t get enough of. As a child of the eighties, can you blame me?

Here’s an animation showing the drastic difference, but also proving that I haven’t changed any of the basic car.

In back, you can see the “brake cooling exhaust” outlets of those rear fender flares. The stock Explorer taillights are ripped out, and the sockets filled with new units with turn signals and back-up lights that pay homage to the lozenge shapes of the original Taurus SHO. I’d make them slightly convex so we could just surface mount non-illuminated ribs on the tailgate part.

Once again, an animation of the stock and modified Explorers:

Come on, this thing should be able to halve the zero to sixty time of that factory ST model, so it might as well look the part, right?

‘Murican Muscle For The ‘Ring

Exactly how many Explorer SHOs we’d build or even be able to sell is unknown, but I’d keep it well under 2000 units. Unlike the earlier SHOs that were relative bargains, I doubt this new SUV version with the GTD-style motor would be cheap, with a price likely in the low-to-mid $100,000 range. Still, have you seen what a top-end Cayenne or the Lamborghini version of that VW performance SUV goes for? We could build an Explorer fast enough to compete with them for less and still keep that outlaw blue-collar-interloper vibe of the original hot Taurus.

They say that you can’t turn a pig into a gazelle, but you can make a very fast pig. The Explorer SHO would be quite a quick slab of bacon indeed.

Top graphic base image: Ford