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 I've recently been accused of
having nostalgia for my SHO... and darn right I do! When I saw the “accusation” in The Garage Blog (actually, an insightful diagnosis) recently, it brought back lots of memories - mostly good.
My 1989 SHO was fast, light, good handling, and lithe – it was the perfect “stealth” car for a very fast driving style. Of course I miss it.
But I only bought the SHO because circumstances required it. My company offered me a unique assignment in Toronto Canada that I couldn’t pass up. I moved from Austin TX to Toronto (Canadian Govt. allowing a maximum of 2 years residence) to help start a brand-new and very strategic product line. We began our mission with 3 transplants from Austin, 1 from California, and several very very good locals. A year later: >167 people and our first product. 15 years later, today, >1000 people (on the core products) and somewhere over a billion a year in revenue. From a humble start, with an entirely new team, and purposely out of the country so as not to be tied to the deadly paradigms and burdensome constraints of the parent company back in the ‘states. That’s why it was put in Toronto, far away from corporate HQ and in heckuva great city that offered a large pool of top-notch software developers.
I knew I’d need a “normal” ride for my time in Toronto, having just completed the first stage of build-up of a new ’91 Mustang GT. The GT clearly wouldn’t cut it in the snow and ice of Canada and I did want to preserve it in excellent condition for my return. Little did I know that the 2 winters I spent in Toronto would be the coldest recorded winters in the history of the city - a FWD car turned out to be a good bet.
So with an easy excuse in hand to buy yet another car, I went looking for something an enthusiast could drive in snow and ice. I found a 1989 SHO, something I’d noted before with interest but had never driven. The test drive at the Ford went very well: two long streaks of rubber (unintentional believe it or not) and a fast revving motor left me quickly convinced that this was the “one”.
The drive up to Toronto was about 1800 miles and it did not go well. I discovered that the SHO was equipped with really poorly designed seats. While they looked good on paper, and were ok for short drives, it was impossible to sit in them for any kind of long distance without basically breaking your back. I had a months stay in a Marriott while I located and leased a condo,. The condo was located in the northern suburb of Markham, on Austin Street (Austin Texas being where I wanted to live in the longer term, a plan set aside for 2 years due to this assignment. So Austin street - while a coincidence - would keep the target fresh in my mind).
I had about a 12 mile commute every day down to the office in the SHO (whiel I used to be able to convert miles to kilometers ("kims"), I can't remember how anymore) and the car was perfect for a quick ride and slicing thru traffic. Another coincidence: a few years after I left the product had become so successful that the company built an entirely new campus and moved everybody to Markham - and their new campus is located only a few miles from my former condo. Today this state-of-the-art campus houses 3000 developers working on a wide range of software products.
 A couple of months later some friends from the parent company came to visit on business for a few days. Besides driving the SHO all over Toronto (which probably has the greatest range of restaurants in North America), we decided to drive down to Buffalo NY to sample the legendary chicken wings at the place they were invented: The Anchor Bar.
 An aside: you’ll note in my comparison article of my ’89 vs. ’97 SHOs that my ’89 had a number of major service issues (to put it mildly). The Ford dealer in Richmond Hill who did the work for me (all on warranty, saving me several thousand dollars) also did some repair work on the Multimatic SHO race cars that were at the time just starting to tear up racetracks across much of North America. I couldn’t have been in better hands, although in retrospect I wish I’d connected with MultiMatic when I had the chance. I didn't know the full potential of the SHO until I got a ride in my instructor's car at Bondurant a few years later.
Back to the story. I originally grew up in Buffalo, so I wasn’t concerned by what for me used to be a routine drive between the two cities. If you’ve ever been on the QEW highway between Toronto and Buffalo, you know that this road has a checkered past, and a checkered current, and without doubt a checkered future. It’s always been overcrowded, it’s never been maintained well, and it’s certainly never been properly sized for the job. And it’s been the scene of numerous horrific accidents. It is, however, mostly empty late at night. Perfect for a fast run in the SHO.
  So we did the 115 mile drive in an hour and a half total. And half-way to Buffalo, in the middle of the Burlington Skyway, I discovered what would be one of the most irritating faults of the SHO when I decided to mist off the windowshield. The Taurus has extremely poor airflow characteristics across and around the windshield – the drivers side wiper would very suddenly (and with a loud “bang”) park itself up and on the frame of the door when you crossed over 105 MPH. With no side or facing wind, at 105, it would park the wiper right on the door frame. Wonderful. And you couldn’t get it back onto the windshield without sticking your hand out the window and moving it forcibly back. No good.
But on to Buffalo where as always the wings were great. And ultra hot. And mass quantities of them were filling. That made for a slower and more relaxed drive back, with a tourist stop at Niagara Falls.
So the SHO had a couple of major faults: a dismal service record and lousy aerodynamic engineering. Nonetheless, I eventually got the service items fixed and the car was fine for the duration. Unfortuantely, I was so busy I hardly had a chance to open up the car on deserted roads more than once or twice again. I did have another “QEW experience” on one particularly bad to Pennsylvania: there was a major accident I came across that had shut down the QEW in both directions. The backup of cars was so bad and so slow that I had to hold in the clutch and creep almost the entire distance to Buffalo! And there was also a great weekend spectating at at the Susquehanna Trail Pro Rally in Pennsylvania (in the future, I’ll be adding some video to the site which I took from the SHO). And after one international jaunt around Europe on business, I flew back to Toronto and found my SHO in the airport parking lot had been buried in a major snowstorm. It took a while just to find it, and it took about 2 hours more to dig it out of the mountain of snow and ice. By hand. But it started right up and warmed up quickly.
Altogether I put 69,000 miles on my ’89 SHO and then sold it for $10k after my return to Texas. I also sold the GT at the same time, switching to a ’94 Cobra for my track car instead. The GT sat out my assignment in the garage under my condo in Markham, only venturing out once for a memorable Watkins Glen weekend.
I liked the idea of the SHO so much that I used the same idea again when I left Texas to work in Redmond WA for 2 years. The ’97 SHO I leased from a dealer north of Seattle served the same exact purpose. Although this newer V-8 SHO was not nearly as enthusiastic a performer as the earlier one, the quality and comfort was far higher. I was a little older, wiser, and slower - and so was Ford’s unique performance sedan.
More Information
DrivingEnthusiast.net has:
While in Toronto:
Dining: http://www.dine.to/page.php?PageID=117
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