+Ford Motor Company marketing boss Jim Farley will be in France this weekend where he will be one-third of the driving crew for a pristine 1968 GT40 Mk 1 running in the Le Mans Classic.

The GT40 is an icon of the French endurance classic having it won four years in a row from 1966-69.

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More Racing News – articles | Ecurie Ford France Races GT40 At 2012 Le Mans Classic | The Official Site of Ford Racing |
Le Mans holds a very special place in Ford's racing heritage, and the company has been a faithful partner of the Le Mans Classic since 2004. This year, Ecurie Ford France returns to the race fielding …

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My respect for Judge Richard Posner grows each time he speaks recently

Reshared post from +Talking Points Memo

Richard Posner: “I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.”

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Reagan-Appointed Judge Defends Roberts, Says GOP Has Become ‘Goofy’
Judge Richard Posner was appointed to the bench by former President Ronald Reagan, earning a sparkling reputation as a conservative jurist. But Posner, a 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge in Chi…

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I spent 3 1/2 months in far northern Sweden with a couple of weeks in England thrown in. 

I was working for an automotive supplier known at the time as Kelsey-Hayes (which was later subsumed into Lucas and then later still into TRW but that's another story). We had begun work a few months earlier on a full speed traction control system that managed both the brakes and the engine torque.  Up until that time we had only done work on brake-only systems so we basically started from scratch. 

I spent countless hours that winter driving on frozen lakes, snow covered roads and even some heated asphalt and learned a lot about real world vehicle dynamics and how we could influence it with electronic control systems. Although I didn't know it at the time, many of the lessons I learned from driving and analyzing the sensor data would later be incorporated into enhanced ABS, stability control and even launch control systems. 

+Motor Trend Magazine takes a look at the differences between traction control and launch control in an excellent primer.

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Launch Control vs. Traction Control – Motor Trend
Just as closed-loop control systems have enabled powertrain engineers to extract more work from every drop of fuel, they're also helping vehicle integration engineers do the same when it comes to enab…

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Reshared post from +Mike Elgan

Best name ever for a dessert at a Cuban restaurant!

Spotted at the restaurant Asia de Cuba in L.A.'s Mondrian hotel.

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Every year or two +Ford Racing builds a run of just 50 Mustang CobraJets. These are factory built drag race race specials that competitors can buy and trailer directly from the dealer to the local strip. Most of the assembly process takes place right on the same line with all of the other regular Mustangs at the Flat Rock assembly line. Before the body-in-white heads into the paint shop the techs do some extra welding on the seams to extra rigidity and install a full competition roll-cage.

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