Unless you’re old enough to remember the muscle cars of the 1960s, Mercury’s name hardly ever comes up when talking about performance. Sure there were models like the Cougar XR-7, Tracer LTS and Marauder, but beyond those, Mercury never received anything that was really special. Things might have been different had engineers got their way in the late 1980s, though. Mercury had plans for a performance version of its Sable sedan, and it even released a special edition to test out some of the ideas.
I was alerted to this random bit of information in a YouTube video by Green Hawk Drive, who was doing a round up of the strangest special editions offered by Ford. Doing a bit more digging I was able to piece together some more information, but given this is about a 30-plus-year-old car from an automobile division that doesn’t exist anymore, information is sparse.
In 1989, Mercury was celebrating its 50th anniversary. To commemorate that anniversary, the brand rolled out a special edition of its Sable sedan that was available in either base LS or top-of-the-line GS grades. Aside from “50th Anniversary” badges on the lower front fenders and trunk, there wasn’t anything special about these Sables. That is, until you looked under the skin.
According to a man named Robert DeLaMare, a Mercury expert, the 50th anniversary Sables were the first step in a larger plan to make a performance version of the car. Apparently Mercury wanted a touring sedan that could go up against other American touring sedans at the time, like the Buick Electra/Park Avenue Ultra and the Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Touring Sedan. The sedan was to be called the Sable LTS, a moniker that was also used on the Tracer LTS compact “performance” sedan.
The Sable LTS was to use all the performance parts from the successful Ford Taurus SHO, including the chassis, suspension and interior bits. As for the powertrain, the Yamaha V6 was to stay SHO-specific. The Sable LTS would have used a high-output version of the 3.8-liter Essex V6 that was in the Ford Taurus Police Package. Green Hawk Drive says this would’ve given the Sable LTS a power output of around 160 horsepower. Here’s where the unique part of the 50th Anniversary Sable comes in: They were a light testbed for the Sable LTS, so each of the 50 that were built had the suspension setup from the Taurus SHO.
Sadly, the performance Sable was not meant for this world. The Ford Taurus SHO launched and got the attention of enthusiasts the world over. Not wanting to cannibalize sales of the performance sedan, the Sable LTS was killed and its development costs were put towards the SHO, which lasted three generations in the 1990s before it appeared again in the early 2010s. Mercury never made a performance version of the Sable, and the LTS badge eventually became nothing more than the top trim level for the Sable in 1994.
Had Mercury gone and made the Sable LTS, the brand might have looked a bit different. I doubt the Sable LTS would have been enough to save the brand from getting the axe; the market for badge engineered Fords was only so big. Still, the Sable LTS would have at least made the brand a bit more interesting.