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The following material is from CHAPTER ONE: DESERT STORM. In this excerpt from IRON FIST, LEAD FOOT: Ford Special Vehicle Team leader John Coletti is participating in the late 2000 edition of the team's annual "Western Drive," an opportunity to evaluate new vehicles that are under development. In this portion of the book, Coletti has just driven the proposed 2002 SVT Mustang Cobra prototype, a car that was destined to serve as the flagship vehicle of Ford's SVT. And, to put it mildly, he is not a happy man...
"What the hell’s going on here?” John Coletti asked himself. He felt a sense of disbelief – and a growing swell of anger.
Behind the wheel of the big, bad Mustang Cobra, Coletti was thundering through the desert – and zipping just behind was a little Ford Focus, right on his tail. Granted, it was an SVT Focus, tweaked for power and handling, but SVT’s boss was wheeling the big brother of the little compact. That Focus should have been eating dust.
No matter what Coletti did, the little car hung tough, like a mosquito buzzing around a tiger. And the longer the Focus stayed in his sight, the greater Coletti’s agitation grew. This Mustang Cobra was supposed to be the flagship of SVT? This car that was having trouble dispatching a Ford Focus?
“It just didn’t have any torque in higher gears,” Coletti recalls. “In the lower gears it had more torque, but when you got up to the higher end? It just didn’t have it.”
At this critical moment there was little radio traffic on the frequency the SVT crew used for communication between cars on the Western Drive – except for the booming voice of the angry Coletti, that is.
“Nobody was even talking anymore on the radios,” Coletti remembers, “because nobody wanted to hear me bitching any more - I’d just had it.”
All too soon, it was time for a gas break in a tiny desert town. And time to face Coletti.
“So we get to Shoshone, and everybody’s trying to stay away from me,” Coletti readily admits. Primo Goffi, SVT engineer and Cobra team manager, was an eyewitness.
“John’s just got that mist in his face like he’s ready to erupt,” Goffi relates. “He’s ready to come unglued. He said, ‘You know guys, I’m going to go into this store and see if they sell any Alpo. And I’m going to buy a six-pack and throw it in the back seat of this thing because it’s a dog. And I’m not going to associate myself with this thing because it is a dog.’”
On the spot, Coletti collared Tom Bochenek, Cobra program manager, and Bill Lane, powertrain engineering supervisor, in what has become known in SVT-lore as “the picnic table performance review.”
“I grabbed Bochenek because he was the program manager and I grabbed Mr. Lane because he’s the powertrain guy, and we began to… reason,” Coletti says with exaggerated emphasis. “I told them, ‘Guys, that’s it – we ain't doing the program. That’s no Cobra. Jesus Christ, it’s an embarrassment – we ain’t doing that car.’
Coletti laughs now, but at the time he was beyond serious.
“I probably said a lot of other things,” he admits. “The reason I know I was pissed is because I can’t remember what I said! That’s how pissed I was. Maniacal, you know? Because everybody remembers that part of it – and I don’t!”