Ford Made A Ranger SHO 4 Years Before The SVT Lightning

We used to be a proper country. A country where performance pickups like the Chevy 454 SS, Toyota Tacoma X-Runner and GMC Syclone roamed the streets. Performance pickups still exist today like the Ram TRX and Ford F-150 and Ranger Raptor models, but they’re off-road focused. Things might have been different had Ford been first to the performance pickup party in the late 1980s.

Ford’s Ranger Raptor Wants Its Midsize Off-Roading Crown Back

Make no mistake, Ford wasn’t first with the idea of a performance pickup. That honor goes to Dodge and its Lil Red Express Truck in 1978. But the first modern performance pickups for the street wouldn’t come about until the early 1990s, starting with Chevy’s 454 SS in 1990. About a year earlier however, Ford was working on something special.

First shown in the Spring 1990 Edition of Minitruckin Magazine, Ford made a one off Ranger SHO. This wasn’t some non-functional show car. This was a fully working, drivable prototype. As the SHO moniker implied, stuffed under the hood of the compact (this SHO was based on the second gen Ranger, when it was still small. For comparison, the regular cab short bed SHO was nearly three and a half inches shorter than a Honda HR-V) pickup was the same 3.0-liter 24-valve V6 from the Taurus SHO. It made 200 horsepower and 220 lb-ft of torque.

The engine wasn’t all stock of course. Ford gave it a modified intake with electronic fuel injection and a freer flowing exhaust through custom two-inch headers. The power was put down through a Borg Warner five-speed manual transmission with a modified shifter lifted from the Mustang GT and a Ford Performance clutch. Ford also threw on a limited slip differential and a custom drive shaft.

A performance suspension not only lowered the truck but helped it handle. Twin I-beam suspension from Ford Performance along with Koni shocks helped the truck corner with virtually no body lean. All those modes actually made one scary little pickup. Retired Ranger vehicle engineer Phil Schilke apparently used to take this thing racing. In a Ranger owners forum post, he described how it had a 10,000 RPM redline and how it would dust Corvettes. “Engine Engineering disabled the rev limiter giving 10,000 rpm under my foot. Could dust off any Vette on the street in first gear! Great fun, and sports car handling,” he said.

Screenshot: Our Lifestyle Podcast YouTube

The SHO Ranger even looked the part of a performance pickup, at least in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s sense. It got a bright white paint job that you could probably see coming a mile away, European style ground effects with Euro bumpers and deep front air dams. The bed had a thick sports bar rising out of it while around back it had a square exhaust outlet and red “SHO” badging on the bed door.

The interior was described as luxurious, which, if you’re comparing it to a regular Ranger from the time, it was. There were sport bucket seats with red cloth and vinyl that also covered the door panels and headliner, an upgraded sound system and added water and oil temp gauges to the stock setup.

Sadly Ford seemed to be just testing the waters with the Ranger SHO as Minitruckin said Ford had no plans to bring it to market. It’s great to see that at least a few engineers were thinking about doing something like this. Had the Ranger SHO actually been brought to market, the performance pickup game might look a little different than it does today.