ALLEN PARK, MI (March, 2007) -- Many things have changed with the Ford Special Vehicle Team over the past few years, so we'd like to use this opportunity to share a little about what I consider a transformed organization. SVT has always been a family, and always will be. The folks who work on SVT programs live, eat, and breathe performance vehicles -- so in the coming months we'd like you to get to know the faces behind the cars (and also trucks) and talk a little shop.

I'm the new SVT Chief Nameplate Engineer, which means I'm responsible for all current and future SVT vehicle programs. You've already met Kerry Baldori -- SVT Chief Functional Engineer -- a.k.a. "head technical guy." We work very closely together to conceive and deliver a new SVT lineup of performance machinery. It's the first time SVT programs have been led by two car guys both with racing backgrounds (mine in desert off-road racing, and Kerry in Indycar) -- so rest-assured that beancounters or cup-holder engineers are not behind the wheel here … (Disclaimer: Not that there is anything wrong with beancounters or cup-holder engineers!)

I've been at Ford since graduating from college as an electrical engineer 15 years ago. It's amazing how 15 years can fly by like nothing when you get to play with cars for a living. And when you make that performance cars, the years go by even faster! I came to SVT in 2002, when John Coletti brought me in as the Ford GT Program Manager. When we finished the Ford GT, most of us went on to the GT500 program, myself included. Talk about getting addicted to 500+ hp cars! As the Shelby GT500 Program Manager, it was my job to adapt the mainstream Ford development system to SVT Engineering. That's when Ford really started dialing up the expectations on what SVT had to deliver. Then-director Hau Thai-Tang had expected a lot of SVT, both technically and financially, and I have to say that with the GT500, we showed an SVT program could still deliver on both fronts.

Many of the lessons learned from the Ford GT were instituted on the Shelby GT500 program. Probably the biggest change we have implemented is with the dedicated in-house vehicle engineering group. They are the guys that set all the vehicle targets and make sure the hardware is delivering on those targets: vehicle dynamics, performance, NVH, aerodynamics, cooling -- you name it. And when you jump into a Shelby GT500 and the ride doesn't beat you up or the clutch pedal doesn't kill your leg in traffic, that's because our vehicle engineering group set targets around those parameters, and made sure we had the right content and designs to deliver those targets. Because of this group, you will see our cars getting more and more refined … but with even more performance. One of best phrases I've ever heard to describe our cars is, "Placing the driver in the eye of the storm." Calm. Smooth. Controlled. But with the fury of 500+ hp blurring everything around you.

We've also dedicated ourselves to engineering with discipline. If you look at the world's great racing cars (regardless of series), the common thread among all the winning ones is that they are engineered with a higher discipline and higher attention to detail than their competition, and they are all usually ready to go at the start of the season. Great cars don't happen by having a bunch of guys just collecting parts and saying, "Yeah this should be a fast car." They happen by smart engineers sweating the details and delivering their parts on time so the next engineers in line have time to do their jobs to the same level of precision. And that's the mindset we live by for SVT vehicle programs.

We just got some great news that our attention to detail and engineering discipline is working. Surveys from early Shelby GT500 owners are in, and it turns out that the GT500 is rated one of the highest cars in the company for initial quality. Amazingly, the incidences of Things Gone Wrong (known as TGWs in corporate-speak) are just 25 percent of what SVT's "Terminator" Cobra was -- and that was a great car to start with! So believe it or not, the SVT brand is on a bit of a roll: When numbers like this come in, it builds strong support within Ford for SVT programs. In fact, I'd say SVT has more support from mainstream Ford right now than it has in quite a while.

One of the most difficult parts of my job these days is not being able to talk about what we're working on. All I can say is that a car and a truck are included in our plans -- and believe me, I would love to tell you more and bounce some of the ideas we have off the many SVT enthusiasts out there. Yes, we are small group -- always have been, always will be. So each engineer has a tremendous amount of responsibility here. And having our engineers sweating the details as much as they do keeps everyone extremely busy.

So how come there aren't six or eight SVT-badged products on the road -- like some of the other OEM performance groups? Well, let's get one thing straight: SVT programs are not about quantity -- they are about the exclusivity of very special vehicles. We don't (and won't) measure our success by how many different platforms we can crank out. That's just not what we are trying to do. We would rather be known as a performance organization that concentrates on a handful of truly innovative, cutting-edge products designed to really blow our customers' minds (in a good way of course!) -- not unlike the Ford GT.

So in the coming months, check back here often and meet some of the people behind some of your favorite vehicles.  I think you'll come to realize why SVT products have so much passion in them and inspire such enthusiasm: They're just a reflection of the people designing them!