On a totally unrelated topic: I googled Larina Hintze since you specifically mentioned her in the blurb about the track.
The first thing that comes up is that she was arrested for perjury a while back regarding fraudulent statements regarding how they conducted transactions for a tutoring business. Managing a race track does seem like a natural progression from that....
Just read the article in the issue I recently got. Got some thoughts...
About the suspension- I'm going to give that one to the marketing people who know who they are selling to. Sometime during my career, they figured out that the Mustang has some irrational collectors. They spend a huge amount of money on even some simple cosmetic changes. So keeping a car that has so much but is still really comfortable on the street is just knowing who you are selling to. And the others who do go racing kind of thing that way, but can tailor their suspension to what they really want to do. So I'd give that a pass.
But the transmission, I do find real fault with Ford on that. Multiple times over the 30 years, I've drive cars that have had amazing transmissions- incredible clutch feel, quick shifters, or for an automatic- really crisp shifts and really well timed ones. On one, it was easy to get it into "hill mode" and it would shift incredibly correctly as you approached a corner aggressively. So the ability to make a great transmission whether manual or auto is there. Or at least was there. That's the risk of cutting people who have been there for a while and assuming that their replacements can do the same thing. But the reality is knowing how to set up an transmission so that it fits the corporate guidelines AND can be great, or you kind of brush off the guidelines to make it great (as the guidelines are to satisfy the 99% street driver). The people and managers who know when to push the guides or ignore them may have been part of the forced retirements or buyouts which is why you can't just cut people for the sake of cutting people.
It's possible that over the next model years, those people can re-emerge, but the time it takes to get that back really takes away from a great product.
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