By Tim Harris, Blair Smith & Shinoo Mapleton · June 19, 2026

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Tim's dispatch has moved coordinates. He's out of Puerto Rico for the summer and up in North Carolina with his 1993 Mazda Miata LE — black over red. And the dispatch itself is a softer beat than we've had in a while.

No supergroup this week. No AI advisor. Just a father and his daughter on one of the great American driving roads, in a 33-year-old Miata, with the dad getting gently corrected by the kid. Which is — and this is going to be relevant — one of the better arguments for why cars like that one still matter.

Back in studio, this episode is built around one big question: why do some cars feel "right" while others, despite all their numbers, just don't? Aerospace engineer Derek Peterson is back for round two, this time to share the engineering framework his career in flight controls gives him — and to explain why a Pininfarina Battista made him physically sick, why a 1977 911 Turbo wouldn't, and why the 2016 Shelby GT350 has one of the best-feeling shifters of the modern era.

We'll get to that. Let's clear the desk first.

In a Carwow interview that made the rounds this week, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda was direct about where he sits on combustion engines. The quote, near-verbatim:

Shinoo's take, with affection: there's some heartstring-tugging in there. Toyota is the biggest car company in the world. He's not actually alone. But he is the loudest voice from a major OEM still arguing for the position, and Toyota's actions back the rhetoric — the GR product line keeps expanding, and a Toyota chief engineer just confirmed the company is testing a mid-engine all-wheel-drive sports car widely assumed to be the next MR2. Blair's skepticism on the AWD packaging is fair (a true MR2 footprint and AWD are hard to reconcile), but the bigger story is that Toyota is still building this stuff.

The throughline of the conversation: when a brand is run by an enthusiast — Akio at Toyota, Jim Farley at Ford — the product reflects it. That's been a Shinoo-written newsletter take on this site for a few months now, and it keeps holding up.

The other big OEM news this week: Ford is ending its long-running Shelby licensing relationship and moving to Dark Horse as its Mustang performance branding. Roughly $30 million in licensing fees paid to Shelby America over the years, and Ford has decided it can do the work in-house — increasingly with Multimatic, which has been quietly building most of Ford's serious performance hardware (the GTD, the GT4 race cars, much of the Ford GT program).

The split take in the studio: Shinoo thinks it's the right move. Shelby's racing heritage is real but it's 50 years old, and modern Ford performance is Ford and Multimatic, not Shelby. Blair is more mixed — the Shelby name has emotional weight, the GT350 is his favorite Ford ever, and the Dark Horse branding hasn't yet captured the imagination the way Shelby did. The thing both agreed on: it doesn't really matter what they call the next car as long as it's actually a good car. They are competing with a C8 Z06 now, and that bar moved last month.

Derek Peterson is back. Last visit he walked us through the Porsche VIP and Sonderwunsch programs. This visit he's here as a mechanical engineer with a career in aerospace flight controls — the system between the pilot's hand and the airplane's control surfaces — and his core argument is that the framework he applies to aircraft is also the framework that explains why some cars feel "right" and others don't.

The first thing Derek wants to fix is the language. In automotive engineering, NVH — noise, vibration, harshness — is treated as something to engineer out. Quiet the cabin. Isolate the chassis. Eliminate driveline vibration. The targets all point one direction.

In aerospace, none of those things are called NVH. They're called feel. And feel is not something you engineer out — it's something you engineer in, deliberately, because pilots use it to fly the airplane.

That shift in language matters. Once you start calling it feel, you stop trying to eliminate it. You start trying to design it.

Derek's foundational example is the progression from small aircraft to fly-by-wire.

In a Cessna, the pilot's control column connects to the control surfaces with steel cables. The pilot is strong enough to move the surfaces directly, which means every aerodynamic force on the wings and tail comes back through the stick. If the airplane is about to stall, you feel it — the control surfaces vibrate, the stick buzzes in your hand, and your body knows what's happening before your brain does. The Cessna has perfect feel because the architecture has no other choice.

A commercial airliner can't work that way. The pilot isn't strong enough to push the surfaces, so amplified servos came in, and then eventually fly-by-wire — where the pilot is completely disconnected from the surface and is sending an electrical signal that a computer translates. Same word as the automotive world's "steer-by-wire" and "brake-by-wire," and the same problem: if you remove the feedback, the pilot is flying with only their inner ear and their eyes. That works in clear conditions. In an emergency, with high workload and disorientation, the inner ear becomes the only sense the pilot has. Derek's reference point, somberly, is the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash — a disoriented pilot, no visual reference, and no haptic feedback to compensate.

The aerospace solution is to fake the feel back in. Springs, dampers, masses, eccentric weights that vibrate at specific stall regimes — all of it engineered in, deliberately, so the pilot's body knows what's happening without having to think.

The F-16 is the cleanest example. It's aerodynamically unstable on purpose (instability is what makes it dogfight-capable), and no human is fast enough to control it without a computer. The pilot uses a sidestick that is purely force-based — the harder you push, the more G's you pull. The original sidestick had zero motion. The pilots got pilot-induced oscillations (PIOs) — they'd overcorrect, weave, and lose stability. The fix was to add a quarter inch of movement to the stick. That tiny amount of displacement gave the pilot enough proprioceptive feedback to control the airplane. A quarter inch of feel saved the airframe.

That's the framework. Engineers can design feedback in. The question is whether they've been asked to.

Derek's cautionary tale is the Pininfarina Battista. A local dealer brought one through and offered him a drive. He was up front that EVs weren't on his radar, but the dealer was a friend and the team had flown in from Italy, so Derek went.

The car is, by every objective measure, extraordinary. The Pininfarina team is excellent. Fit and finish is perfect. It is also 2,000 horsepower, 7,000 pounds, and full steer-by-wire — no mechanical connection from the wheel to the road.

The representative took Derek for a passenger ride first and pinned it. The tunnel-vision effect EVs give you at full power has a name in physiology. The Battista's version of it made Derek sick for a full day. When they swapped seats, Derek refused to do the full power pull because there was no point. He drove it up the canyon and the steering felt wrong. He turned to the rep:

The Pininfarina engineers nailed the brief they were given. The car is fast, stunning, beautifully built. The brief was the problem. Acceleration is not the issue. The 918 in the family collection is also extraordinarily quick and doesn't make Derek sick — because the 918 still has sensory inputs. The Battista is what happens when you give engineers every dollar they want and the wrong target.

His parting line on the test drive: he'd rather be driving a 1977 911 Turbo with a loud exhaust and a great-feeling shifter. Which sounds like nostalgia until you realize it's the opposite. It's a precise engineering preference.

The counter-example Derek pulled up — and the one that surprised Blair — is the S550 Shelby GT350. That car has one of the best-feeling manual shifters of the modern era, not by accident but because the engineers paid attention to the synchros specifically. The synchros are what make a gear engagement feel buttery, and the GT350's combination (Derek recalls a brass-and-carbon design) was tuned for feel rather than just for shift speed.

This is why Porsche enthusiasts argue about the 915 gearbox versus the G50 — the 915's synchros were designed by Porsche in-house and felt different (slower but more communicative), while the G50 used a faster Getrag-supplied synchro that shifts quicker but doesn't reward the hand the same way. Both work. Both are good engineering. They were just engineered to different targets.

Engineers, Derek's repeated point, will always hit the target you give them. The problem is the target.

Modern automotive metrics are 0-to-60, horsepower, lap time, and EPA. None of those measure feel. None of them reward Derek's quarter-inch of sidestick travel.

Aerospace already has the math. Force-displacement curves. Hysteresis loops — the requirement that pressing a control with X force at Y position has to return the same way it went in, within tight tolerance. Friction targets and deadband zones for steering racks. All of it measurable, all of it specifiable, all of it ignored in mainstream automotive engineering because nobody is asking for it on the brief.

The good news Shinoo dropped: a contact in England suggests Lotus is actively working on feel as an engineering target. If that's true at the halo level, it tends to trickle down. And the example of the Polestar 2 BST — a racing-tuned variant with proper dual-flow shocks that transforms an otherwise sensible commuter — proves a chassis engineer can pull this off when given the brief.

The personal anchor of the conversation, for Blair, is the 111 RS Elise he bought from Shinoo. The first time he tracked it, he called Shinoo the morning of nervous about not having traction control — he'd only ever tracked modern cars with electronic safety nets. Shinoo's answer was that he'd be fine because he'd feel everything. He did feel everything. He had the most fun he's ever had on track and never once felt unsafe. He drove the car as fast or faster than he'd ever driven a GT4 — because feel translated directly into confidence, which translated into safer, faster, more enjoyable driving.

This is Derek's closing argument, restated. Feel isn't sentimentality. It's not nostalgia for old cars. It's the engineering loop that lets a human being control a fast machine in a high-workload environment. It is the same reason an F-16 needs a quarter inch of stick travel and the same reason a 911 R's electronic throttle is harder to rev-match than a Ferrari 308's mechanical one.

The cars that feel special feel special because somebody engineered the feel in.

The cars that don't feel special — including, for now, most EVs — feel that way because nobody asked the engineers to.

That's the gap. And it can be closed.

This is the answer to the question Blair's son was asking at Cars & Coffee. The MG Midget was the most exciting car at a show full of Lambos and an R8 — not because it was fast, but because every input on that car connects to something mechanical you can feel. The Miatas at the Flying Miata camp keep drawing middle-aged guys back to Grand Junction for the same reason. The Caterham 7 has survived for fifty years for the same reason. The S550 GT350 won the synchro argument for the same reason. Derek loved the 111 RS for the same reason.

If you've ever wondered why a Lotus, a Miata, a classic Porsche, or a properly specified American muscle car feels different from a perfectly engineered hypercar — it's not magic. It's a set of metrics aerospace has been measuring for decades and the automotive industry has been quietly ignoring.

Derek will be back. Probably soon.

– Tim, Blair & Shinoo

🏁 The Full Throttle Talk Team

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