They're part of the reason the SHO has such a composed ride, but they aren't terribly athletic shoes, and we found they protested too early and too often when pushed hard into corners.

To be fair, if we had nearly 4,400 pounds of metal bearing down on a few square inches of our contact patches, we'd probably take to howling with a quickness, too. Simply put, retuned suspension or no, uprated tires or no, the SHO simply possesses too much mass to feel tossable, too much heft for sporting drivers to want to grab it by the scruff and chuck it into a corner *****-nilly. The car's all-wheel drive system is a great safety net and pulls it through corners faithfully when carrying inadvisable amounts of speed, but we couldn't find much joy carving up the otherwise inviting roads that spaghetti around the Great Smoky Mountains.

Ford's suspension tuners are among the best in the business, but they aren't magicians, and they can't suspend the laws of physics. Maybe Dearborn's SVT team could've exacted some more engaging behavior out of the suspension (they were not a part of the SHO's development), but even that's a stretch. The bottom line is the SHO weighs more than a Mercury Grand Marquis (with 60% of the burden looming on the tires that steer) and combined with a front-biased all-wheel drive system, well... it's a recipe for push, not entertainment.

If we are beginning to sound a bit disappointed, well, we are. But perhaps it's our fault. By fixating on the "SHO" badge glued to the trunk lid, we duped ourselves us into thinking that this car would be different than what it turned out to be – despite the fact that we already understood that the regular-strength 2010 model intentionally orbits a wholly different planet than it did in the Eighties and Nineties. We thought we were getting something emotional – a genuine sport sedan. But real sport sedans respond to quick changes in direction like an Olympic gymnast. Real sports sedans ferret out corners like washing machines seek out pocket change. Real sport sedans are drawn to a pointed edge. But this SHO is safe-as-houses – it's all smoothed-off curves.

Don't get us wrong, Blue Oval faithful. There's plenty of meat here to get worked up over, but there's just not enough flavor to slake our red-meat enthusiast side. What Ford has wrought with the SHO isn't really a sports sedan at all – it's a four-door cruiser with sporty undertones. It's an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to high performance. And while this big bull generates some pretty handsome numbers, it fails to inspire drivers to push harder, something that we desperately hoped it would do.

In the end, we prefer to think of Ford's highest-spec Taurus as a compellingly priced full-size luxury car for those who aren't hung up on expensive labels. It's an exceptional executive express, and it'd surely be a monumental partner on a transcontinental journey. It's even a great sleeper in the grand tradition. But it isn't a sport sedan. And to us, at least... that means it isn't really a SHO.