I know most of you don’t give two shits but somehow this car seems to have escaped the crusher when the order was given do destroy these cars after prototype testing was complete. The boring car you are looking at is a ALL ALUMINUM mercury sable. Many of these cars were equipped with the 220hp 200tq SHO engine with a 5 speed. The vehicle weight comes in roughly 500lbs lighter than a std SHO and were optioned with the same interior. Total weight comes in a a super light 2900lbs in a full size sedan. That would have been a cool project if it had taken off properly! If that car was fully gutted it would weigh just over 2500lbs!
[quote=“JR”"]
Well, I was at the Canadian Ford HQ and spotted this thing yesterday. I was admiring the 10-15 EcoBoost SHO’s in the visitor lot when i spotted this thing. I thought it was an SHO too, since it has slicers. Upon closer inspection…i knew it wasnt an SHO. Looks like a Sable but the front doesnt look like any Sable I’ve ever seen. Also it had lettering on the rear that said “Aluminum” and then on the opposite side it said “Mercury” but no Sable badging.
Is this some sort of riced out Sable? I like the front grill, looks pretty cool. Although the car could do without the odd vinyl on the front and rear bumpers.
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additional comments
Perhaps it’s the one-off aluminum-bodied sable they made waaaaaaay back when as an experiment in vehicle lightness?
I don’t think all the AIV Sables were crushed, I hope not. The AIV project was largely a Canadian project using Canadian vendors. Multimatic did a lot of the design, tooling and manufacturing for the various body parts. Multimatic had a lot to do with the Ninja Turtle SHO’s and Larry Holt, MM’s CEO, was a hard core SHO guy.
Tho there was at least one AIV Sable SHO, all the AIV’s were not SHO-powered. The AIV Sable SHO was built by the crazies at Multimatic and entered in the 1995 One Lap of America in the mid-priced sedan category. I remember being parked next to it at the start of One Lap in the Dearborn Hyatt Regency parking lot and thinking, “Why would someone put Baer brakes on a Sable?” About then the team leader Ed Luce walked up, complemented me on my SHO, and introduced their driver Scott Maxwell. Ed was one of the AIV program managers for Ford, and as he started to tell me about the car - how light it was, and that it had a SHO drivetrain, Koni suspension, etc., and I already knew about Scott Maxwell and his racing history, I pretty much knew that my SHO One Lap team was screwed.
This car was light, fast, and every time Maxwell got behind the wheel on a track, he drove it like he’d stolen it, and the results speak for themselves: the AIV Sable SHO placed 15th out of 85 entries and set some absolutely blistering lap times.
There was a bit of grousing amongst the Mid-priced sedan entries that the AIV Sable SHO was not a production car, and truth be known, it wasn’t, but Brock Yates let their class win stand.